For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library's existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, 'boutique' digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian's collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has Web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15th century.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/21/2006 05:47:00 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.
