On December 13, the day before Google announced its library project, the Internet Archive announced an international project to digitize over a million books and provide open access to the resulting texts. Unfortunately this important news got buried in the coverage of the Google initiative. From the announcement: 'Today, a number of International libraries have committed to putting their digitized books in open-access archives, starting with one at the Internet Archive. This approach will ensure permanent and public access to our published heritage. Anyone with an Internet connection will have access to these collections and the growing set of tools to make use of them. In this way we are getting closer to the goal of Universal Access to All Knowledge....Over one million books have been committed to the Text Archive. Currently over twenty-seven thousand are available and an additional fifty thousand are expected in the first quarter of 2005....Researchers, scholars, and the general public will be able to leverage these collections in ways that have been familiar to library users for centuries-- unfettered searching through catalogs, reading and annotating the books, and sharing pieces with collegues. The public domain or appropriately licensed books will be viewed on-screen, searched, and printed for free using PDF and DJVU....Technology allows us to provide more enhanced access to these materials. First would be to offer similar access to Amazon.com's trademark Search Inside the Book system for public domain books. Therefore library users would be able to find books that mention relevant words and phrases without having to have the catalog reflect each topic.' The project currently lists 11 participating libraries from Canada, China, Egypt, India, the Netherlands, the United States, and it welcomes other libraries to join the coalition without charge. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/15/2004 10:06:00 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.
