Also see Brock Read's story about it in the April 21 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
At present the registry includes the contents of 150 collections, each of which was digitized through grants issued by the agency. The archives include an array of photographs, artwork, and printed material, along with less commonly digitized fare like fish specimens and other ephemera collected by natural-history museums. Some of the material is iconic, like Edward S. Curtis's early-20th-century portraits of American Indians, digitized by librarians at Northwestern University. But much of the content is of more parochial interest, like a collection of publishers' bindings, mostly from the 19th century, put online by librarians at the Universities of Alabama and Wisconsin at Madison. Officials at the institute conceived the project in 2001 as a way of tracking local digitization efforts that they had helped finance. All too often, those projects languished on the Web as unconnected "puddles of content," says Mamie Bittner, the institute's director of public and legislative affairs....Another goal of the registry project is to develop better ways to build Internet search tools that make use of the hidden tags, known as metadata, that archivists append to their digital materials.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/17/2006 11:43:00 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.
