Library users in Colorado and Wyoming now have access to tens of thousands of additional open-access digitized books and serials through the Prospector Library Catalog. The digitized items originate from the University of Michigan, a partner in the Google Books digitization project and a member of a consortium of libraries called Hathi Trust. Last year the University of Michigan made available bibliographic records for many of the out-of-copyright titles that Google digitized from its collections. The University then made available online files for each of the digitized works.
The bibliographic records were acquired and enhanced by librarians at the Auraria Library in Denver. After the records were loaded into Skyline, the Auraria Library online catalog, they were uploaded to Prospector, the union catalog of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. Now library patrons from across Colorado have access to the online books via the Prospector catalog. Except for the University of Michigan where the books originated, the Auraria Library was the first library in the nation to make these books available to its users.
There are over 105,000 digitized books and serials freely available in this initial phase of the project. ...
Increasingly, these online books and serials will be accessible through library online catalogs like Prospector. This in turn means that more information once available only by visiting a library will be easily accessible to all Coloradoans through the Internet. Through this and other similar projects, Colorado libraries will take advantage of book digitization and will continue to offer more and more materials to library users across the state.
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.
