Librarians and archivists in Canada are hopeful that a new nationwide online project, scheduled to go live today, will pull together digitization efforts across the country and make them easily accessible to the public.
The project, AlouetteCanada, is named after a French-Canadian children's song. It is intended to be a portal site for boutique digitization projects at various colleges and museums. As a searchable, open-access database, Alouette will focus on digitized materials about or of interest to Canadians.
"It's really inaccessible material ... because it has been [digitized] in small projects," said Carole Moore, chief librarian of the University of Toronto, who is helping coordinate the project. "Very few people know about where to find them." Several universities already are participating, and the project is calling on other institutions to contribute digitized material.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/21/2006 01:06:00 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.
