The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 43, October 9, 2005, Article 12

YAHOO-LED ALLIANCE TO DIGITIZE BOOKS

Arthur Shippee and others noted an October 3, 2005
New York Times article describing a challenge to Google
by an alliance of organizations led by Yahoo:

"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 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."

"In a departure from Google's approach, the Open Content
Alliance will also make the books accessible to any search
engine, including Google's. (Under Google's program, a
digitized book would show up only through Google search.)
And by focusing at first on works that are in the public domain
- such as thousands of volumes of early American fiction -
the group is sidestepping the tricky question of copyright
violation."

"The new group is calling for others to join. And Mr. Kahle
of the Internet Archive said he hoped to recruit Google.

"The thing I want to have happen out of all this is have Google
join in," he said. "I know we're dealing with archcompetitors,
but if there's room for these guys to bend, by the time my kid
goes to college, we could have a library system that is just
astonishing."

Full Story

Homepage for the Open Content Alliance: opencontentalliance.org

[These projects are of great interest to numismatic researchers,
and not just because of the possible digitization of out-of-copyright
numismatic literature. By making the contents of a wide range of
works searchable, numismatic researchers stand to uncover a lot
of interesting material that may lay otherwise unnoticed by the
hobby in books not ordinarily found in numismatic libraries. -Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

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