The Library of Congress describes its new "Digitizing American Imprints" Program in a 21-minute webcast from January 14, 2009. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the blurb:
Deanna Marcum, Library of Congress Associate Librarian for Library Services; Doron Weber, Program Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and officials of the Internet Archive participated in a news conference on the Library's "Digitizing American Imprints" program scanning "brittle books" too fragile for standard use, to preserve them, on an open-content basis, for future generations.
PS: The new pilot project is the the LOC's first mass-digitization effort for books, and aims to digitize 100,000 public-domain books for OA. The occasion for the webcast was the digitization of the 25,000th book. "Openness" is one of the project's four guiding principles --quality, quantity, openness, and leadership. Also see the press release issued on the same date (which we blogged at at the time).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/19/2009 11:47:00 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.
