Congratulating Boston
As a Yankee fan there have been many difficult moments during these past few weeks, but I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Boston. Not the Red Sox, I am not that desperate, but rather the Boston Library Consortium. The BLC has decided to work with the Open Content Alliance in facilitating the scanning and making available to the public of the Consortium members’ collections. As reported in this NYT’s article (more here), the BLC has decided against working with Google and Microsoft because of the restrictions which both of them placed on the scanned material. While Google or Microsoft would pay for the scanning, they would retain the rights to the digitized images and also restrict which search engines could access the images. I am not denying that Google Books is good and that it makes accessible important works, just that if a non-commercial alternative is available, that might be preferable. Some funding for the project has already been secured, and let’s hope that the model of open access can sustain itself.
February 7th, 2008 at 9:18 am
[...] 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 [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 am
[...] quality, access to digital collections, the commercial aspect of many LSDI’s (see more here) and the impact of digital collections on print collections. (hat [...]