When the University of Michigan announced that it was providing a set of records for harvest via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) of all the public domain books digitized by Google, I promptly grabbed them and put up a prototype search service. At the time (December 2007) there were nearly 110,000 records.
Now there are about 130,000. If this growth rate continues to hold, it means that an additional 40-50,000 public access books will be added by the University of Michigan each year. If additional Google libraries do as the University of Michigan is doing, we may soon have several hundred thousand or more open access books available. Since the University of Michigan is offering MARC records for harvesting, there really isn't anything preventing libraries from adding these records to their catalogs and perhaps dramatically increasing access to books for their local users. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/26/2008 03:47:00 AM.
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.
