The new Library of Alexandria will try to realize the ambition of its ancient predecessor by making "virtually all of the world's books available at a mouse click." This phrase is from a story in today's New York Times. I'd like to say more but the story lacks just about all the detail worth reporting --and if the Library web site could help, I'll have to wait until it's working. The project will be called the Alexandria Library Scholars Collective (no web site known to Google), and has the support of the Egyptian government, UNESCO, and the Mellon Foundation, although it will need a lot more funding to get past Phase One. The project is the brainchild of American Rhonda Roland Shearer, who designed the software and led the fund-raising. Her non-profit Art Science Research Lab will run the project with the Library.
My hazy impression is that the project will use new software to link together new and existing text archives around the world, with extensive options for user customization. Minus some of the customization, this sounds exactly the project, already in progress, to make distributed text archives throughout the world interoperable through the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol. By depending on a standard, rather than a single software package, the OAI project allows anyone to write software to create and maintain the archives (such as Eprints, DSpace, or CDSWare) and tools to search and otherwise process the data contained in them. Is the Alexandria Library Scholars Collective based on the OAI standard? Is it aiming at the same end without the standard? (If so, why?) Is it aiming at a different end? So far I can't find the answers, and would appreciate hearing from any readers who can. More later, I hope.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/01/2003 10:15:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
