Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Yale sitting on digitized books, not sure how to scan others

Carol Hsin, Digitization project derailed, Yale Daily News, September 10, 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

Four months after Microsoft abruptly terminated its multi-million dollar book digitization deal with the University, Yale officials said they will have to wait for donations or grants to come in before they start another major book scanning project.

The University still has some plans to continue digitizing materials held in its libraries and museums that are unique to Yale. Whether those materials will end up on the Internet, however, remains unclear. ...

100,000 volumes ... were originally part of the Microsoft deal — which the technology giant called off when it decided to focus its search efforts more narrowly ... Instead, just about 30,000 books from the agreement have been scanned, and Yale does not yet know how it will disseminate those materials online.

Associate University Librarian Ann Okerson said Yale is currently negotiating hosting agreements with Google and the Open Content Alliance, a collection of organizations adding to a public digital archive, but nothing has been finalized yet. Those deals, however, would only put the already-scanned volumes online.

Prochaska said the University would be interested in a “future contract with Google about digitizing material,” but added that Google is not looking to enter into such agreements right now.

Until then, Yale will continue to focus its digitization efforts on materials that only Yale owns and has received funding to scan. ...

See also our past post on Microsoft's pull-out at Yale.