Confessions of a Mad Librarian

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!!