Yahoo officials say that the project is not a response to Google's partnership with five major research libraries to scan millions of books, and that some planning for the Yahoo project was under way before Google announced its plans last December. The new archive is called the Open Content Alliance, and it was conceived in part by Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. The archive will be doing much of the actual scanning for the project, using a process it has developed in recent years....Leaders of the project stressed that no books that are under copyright will be scanned unless the copyright holders give explicit permission....That plan means the Open Content Alliance will be limited mostly to out-of-copyright works — and to works by publishers who are willing to experiment with giving their content away online. The project will allow generous access to the materials it holds, however — in some cases even allowing users to download the full texts of books. Neither Yahoo nor any other group involved has been given exclusive rights to the content, according to the project's leaders. In fact, the books will be made available in ways that can be searched by other search engines, David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president for search content, said in an interview....To help jump-start the project, Mr. Mandelbrot said, Yahoo will pay for the scanning of an 18,000-volume collection of American literature at the University of California system. Yahoo is also developing the technology to search the books. Yahoo does not expect to profit from the arrangement, said Mr. Mandelbrot, but sees it instead as a "philanthropic effort" to put more content online. "Any monetization that's able to be generated specifically as part of this program would only be used to fund additional digitization of public-domain or copyrighted works," he said....Mr. Greenstein said the University of California would add materials by selecting and scanning certain collections. The project will probably cost the university system $500,000 for the first couple of collections, he said....The Internet Archive has been working with the University of Toronto for the past year in a pilot project to test its scanning process, Carole Moore, the university's chief librarian, said in an interview. So far, she said, about 2,000 books have been scanned, and more than 1,000 of those are already available through a section of the Internet Archive. She said Toronto has coordinated with six other Canadian university libraries, as well as the Library and Archives of Canada, to select books by Canadian authors to be scanned for the project. "We're trying to contribute for everyone a certain amount of Canadian material," she said. Leaders of the project hope that more and more libraries will add unique portions of their collections, so that jointly the new central digital library can one day hold nearly every public-domain work. "We're trying to nail bringing public access to the public domain," said Mr. Kahle. "We want people to be able to do great things with the classics of humankind."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/10/2005 12:00:00 PM.
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.
