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October 02, 2005
Yahoo! goes into digitization biz (with a little help from the Internet Archive and UC)
It's official:
An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce today an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its archrival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago.
The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the wide-ranging goal of digitizing historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.
I'm admittedly biased, but I think this is big. And cool. Some of the features (from the Open Content Alliance's FAQ):
- [M]aterial will be free to read, and in most cases, available for saving or printing using formats such as PDF
- Metadata for all content in the OCA will be freely exposed to the public through formats such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and RSS
- OCA welcomes all efforts to create and offer tools (including finding aids, catalogs, and indexes) that will enhance the usability of the materials
- All material will be in the public domain or with the express permission of the rights holder
- Current content collections include material from: European Archive; Internet Archive; National Archives (UK); O'Reilly Media; Prelinger Archives; University of California; and University of Toronto
It is not as ambitious as the Google Print project, but it has the potential to be a very useful supplement, as well as a way to promote open standards and collaboration.
In other words: Woo hoo!!
Posted by misseli at October 2, 2005 10:25 PM
Comments
Hello !
I work for a lawyer who wants to digitalize all of his heavly binded legal books and maintain a digital library. There are over 12,000 books to be scanner, unfornately there isn't much work with regard to this going on here in Hyderabad. And couldn't find much information on the web. Any sugg as to where I can get the data? How expensive is it to get a consultant for this job?
Posted by: Maria at October 5, 2005 04:39 AM
Boy, I haven't been here for a while. You still got the latest scoop. I am slow on picking up news these days. It's interesting to see Yahoo/Google bump heads now. Will the library of the future run by bunch of search engines? Or the search engines become the libraries of our future?
Posted by: Sandy at October 10, 2005 11:40 PM