Columbia U. to Digitize Books
I was looking up a book in the Columbia University Library catalogue, and I noticed the following news item.
Columbia University and Microsoft Corp. are collaborating on an initiative to digitize a large number of books from Columbia University Libraries and make them available to Internet users. With the support of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), publicly available print materials in Columbia Libraries will be scanned, digitized, and indexed to make them readily accessible through Live Search Books.
Columbia University and Microsoft are partners in the Open Content Alliance, along with the Boston Library Consortium, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Toronto among others. The alliance, which has made open access a core component of its mission, is scanning only out-of-copyright materials
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This is definitely good news, and it is nice to see that Columbia is joining up with the Open Content Alliance (OCA). See a previous post on the OCA here. I wonder if something has changed, since according to this article it seemed that it was the OCA vs. Microsoft and Google. The more that out-of-print and hard to find books are made available, the better for all of us.