This article summarizes highlights from a symposium presented by the University of Michigan Library and the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS). The title of the symposium was “Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects.” The author, former executive director of NCLIS, prepared and NCLIS published a 24-page report that is available at www.nclis.gov. – Editor....
The key questions for information policy clustered into four areas of discussion.
1. How should important aspects of copyright – fair use, orphan works, opt-in vs. opt-out models – be handled in digitization projects? ...
2. Quality: When is the quality of OCR good enough? What about quality of content and authentication? ...
3. What are the roles of publishers and booksellers in the digital age? ...
4. What business models are needed in the era of mass digitization? How will the open access movement affect the economics of digitization?
In the Internet’s early days, it was assumed that access to valuable information would be a “pay per drink” or “pay-per-view” model, even though that would make access to information unaffordable for some. What has evolved instead is either free or advertiser-supported information. This model appears to be continuing with the Google and other mass digitization projects.
Viable and sustainable technological innovations do not spring forth suddenly without a period of experimentation during which an economic model is developed. For example, iPods and the selling of billions of songs would not exist today without Napster. However, the economic model is much harder to develop for books because users are not helping to build the ecology as they did with music. Google is stepping forward to do it and to take the risks. According to Tim O’Reilly, “This is why the Google Library Project matters.”
Open access. Many inside and outside the publishing field think that open access sounds exactly like publishing, and they question the sustainability of that model. If all of this is becoming a public good, who is going to pay for it?
Supporters of the Open Content Alliance say that it fits in the digital world in a variety of ways. It is building a collection of openly accessible information. The University of California is trying to scale up to digitizing 5000 books a month – largely out of copyright materials.
On the other hand, a lot of the value in Google is its vast amount of content, which is not true for the Open Content Alliance....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/09/2006 01:09:00 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.
