As it works with Google to scan nearly all the books on its shelves, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has decided not to make full-text versions of copyrighted books available online, even to on-campus users.
The university has upgraded its online card catalog to include full-text electronic copies of books that have been scanned as part of its controversial partnership with Google.
Users will be able to read the complete text of out-of-copyright works online. For those volumes, the university is making high-resolution images available for each page....If a scanned book is still under copyright, though, users will not be able to read the digital copy. Instead, the card-catalog system will return a list of the pages that contain the search term and how many times the term appears on those pages. The reader will be directed to the library's stacks for the printed book.
Some observers had wondered whether the university might make full-text versions of copyrighted books available at on-campus computers, but Michigan officials ruled out that option early on. "We don't believe that fair use allows us to make that kind of access available to our user community," said John P. Wilkin, an associate university librarian....
Steven J. Bell, director of the library at Philadelphia University, said Michigan's new digital-book service could spur more scholars around the world to use interlibrary loans to request single pages or groups of pages from books held by Michigan. After all, if scholars can consult Michigan's online catalog to find out which pages contain the terms they are looking for, they might request just those pages rather than the entire book....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/31/2006 03:38:00 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.
