The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google announced an agreement today to expand access to hundreds of thousands of public and historical books and documents from more than 7.2 million holdings at the UW-Madison Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library.
The university is the eighth library to join Google's ambitious effort to digitize the world's books and make them searchable on Google Book Search.
The combined library collections of UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society comprise one of the largest collections of documents and historical materials to be found in the United States. The collections are ranked 11th in North America by the Association of Research Libraries in Washington, D.C.
"Wisconsin is in a position to take a leading role in making the primary documents of U.S. government history freely accessible on the Internet for anyone to find and use," says UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell.
Adds Edward Van Gemert, interim director of the UW-Madison General Library System: "Whenever possible, the university intends to make the complete content of public documents available on the Internet, including text, images and maps." ...
The Wisconsin project will initially focus on library collections that are free of copyright restrictions. Most books published before 1923 and publications of the U.S. government are in the public domain by law....
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.
