Google will be scanning and digitizing millions of books from the University of California’s more than 100 libraries across its 10 campuses and making those titles fully searchable, Adam M. Smith, group product manager on Google Book Search, said Tuesday. Google has been working since last year to scan, digitize and make searchable public domain and copyright-protected books from the university collections of the Library of Congress; Oxford, Harvard and Stanford universities; the University of Michigan; and the New York Public Library.
U.C. officials are already having books digitized as part of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), which is led by the nonprofit Internet Archive, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Jennifer Colvin, strategic communications manager at the California Digital Library, which works on digitization projects for the U.C. school system, said she saw no conflict or problems with the school system working with two seemingly competing scanning projects. "We value our partnership with the OCA," she said. "As a public institution, we believe in making our materials as widely and freely available as possible."...
Google is sharing the copies of the scanned books with its library partners but restricting access to them beyond that. For instance, the books can be searched only in its index and not through any other search engines....
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said he was pleased that U.C. will continue to work with the OCA, but he criticized the school for "privatizing its library system" by agreeing to Google’s limitations on distributing and sharing copies of digitized books. "They’re effectively giving their library to a single corporation," Kahle said. "Having a public institution decide to go with Google’s restrictions doesn’t help the idea of libraries being open in the future."
PS: For my take on how the Open Content Alliance is more open than the Google Library project, see my November 2005 article in SOAN.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/09/2006 01:15:00 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.
