From a posting on yesterday's Outsell Now blog: 'There is no shortage of consortia and library groups that have been working on digitization issues in libraries for years. However, it took an outsider third party, Google, to pull this off. In part, that's because it is probably the only entity with the necessary financial resources to finance this huge undertaking, but it is also because Google is the only player with the audacity to act on the grand vision....This isn't a death knell for libraries; it's another shove to get librarians out from behind the stacks and harness their expertise, including subject-matter expertise, and to enhance users’ ability to find, use, and access information in any format....We're moving toward a world in which Google dominates the archival and out-of-copyright works, and Amazon masters the in-print book world. How long before they join forces, or one vanquishes the other in order to fully rule the book world? And in the end, the publishing and library worlds will wonder how this all happened – how did two companies that did not exist a decade ago come to so dominate the information environment?'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/15/2004 10:38:00 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.
