Marie-Christine Doffey is the new director of the Swiss National Library. Here's how she responded to an interviewer who asked about competition from Google. 'We have been watching [Google] very closely. European libraries discussed the plan and France intervened. A number of European countries also reacted and a large-scale digitization programme is being launched. The Google announcement was beneficial in that it made European libraries take a stance on digitization. What Google is trying to do is very interesting. But it's a very ambitious project – they're talking about 18 million digitized documents – and that raises a number of questions such as what type of documents will be digitized, how will copyright problems be resolved and how will the data be stored?...Google has power behind it. It is a competitor in terms of finance, technology, response to users' needs and anticipation of user demand. It is a competitor simply because we will never be able to launch new projects on such a large scale. On the other hand, we can draw inspiration from Google too and see what we can do better.' (Thanks to LIS News.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/15/2005 10:48:00 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.
