Barbara Quint has written two good pieces on Microsoft's decision to wind down its book-scanning and academic search projects. Each was published in Information Today on June 5, 2008.
...The reason for the cancellation was money or the lack of it. Microsoft could not foresee a sustainable business model for the service, though neither Live Search Books nor Live Search Academic had carried any ads beyond links to online booksellers....
[Brewster] Kahle was both surprised and unsurprised by the announcement. "I always knew this would happen. It’s what corporations do. I just didn’t know when. I didn’t think it would be this year. I hoped for another year or so, but I’m thrilled that they worked so long and hard and brought us to another level." ...
Ed Pentz, executive director of CrossRef, says that publishers had told him that Google Scholar was much more productive of referrals [than Microsoft Live Search Academic]. Actually, Pentz added that the main Google service supplied even more referrals than Google Scholar.
When I asked Anurag Acharya, the engineer behind Google Scholar, whether he wanted any content that appeared on Live Search Academic, he said, "I’m not sure, but as far as I know, we have everything they had." When I asked him if there were any features to Live Search Academic he would like to have, he answered, "No. If I liked it, I would have had it." ...
Libraries that seek low-cost mass digitization clearly face a harder challenge. Google remains in a growth mode, but that can hardly last forever. The OCA, with scanning operations already working at 70 libraries and the participation of several large commercial concerns even after Microsoft’s withdrawal, would like to take on as much as they can, but they do charge 10 cents a page....
From the second:
Microsoft...[will not] cease digitizing immediately....For example, according to an article in the May 29 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, librarians at Cornell University expect to see tens of thousands of more books to be digitized by Microsoft before the program ends later this summer....According to Neil Fitzgerald, project manager for the Microsoft digitization project at The British Library (BL), Microsoft "has agreed to work until the completion of the target." ...The Princeton Theological Seminary signed its agreement in January and had expected to go into full production in June, according to Don Vorp, collection development librarian. Ultimately, they hoped to scan some 300,000 books....Vorp expected the scanning to continue for at least the next 60 days, giving them a final count of 3,000–4,000 books....
...Taking advantage of a lemons-to-lemonade opportunity, LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand, Inc., announced it would allow any Microsoft Live Search publisher to migrate online content into its online repositories....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/06/2008 01:22:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
