... [Google] this week announced that it had signed its 29th library partner for Google Book Search. Google officials announced that the Lyon Municipal Library, France’s second largest library after the national library in Paris, and the project’s first partner in France, has signed on to make more than 500,000 books available online as part of Google’s Book Search Library project.
Under the plan, Google and Lyon will digitize and offer access to out-of-copyrights works, to be searchable through Google Book Search. On the Google blog, Gérard Collomb, senator and mayor of Lyon, said the partnership would “open our library doors to the rest of the world.”
More importantly, perhaps, the partnership suggests a thaw in Franco-Google relations, and comes just a year after Google’s most impassioned international critic, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, left his post as head of the French national library. In 2005, Jeanneney made international headlines with an editorial in Paris-based Le Monde expressing alarm over Google’s original plan to digitize books from five prominent university libraries, saying that the plan would favor Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language. In 2006, he published Google and the Myth of Universal Access with the University of Chicago Press, in which he posited that Google’s book scanning plan constituted “a risk of crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations have of the world.”
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.
