Paul W. Taylor, Real-Time Sunshine, Government Technology, March 2005 . Excerpt: 'By one estimate, three-quarters of students rely "mostly on the Internet" for their homework, but powerful search engines could not show us what was not there -- namely books and their contents. That began to change in late 2003 when Amazon.com debuted Search Inside the Book, allowing users to pinpoint a text reference in context and call it up with a single keystroke.... year later, Google trumped Amazon.com's archive by an order of magnitude. In a $150 million alliance with Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library, Google returned to its library roots with an aggressive campaign to build a digital library of possibly 30 million volumes -- roughly equal to the Library of Congress' book holdings (but excluding its 59 million manuscripts)....Alternatives to the Google Print library partnership appeared within 24 hours. A coalition composed of the nonprofit Internet Archive of San Francisco, Carnegie Mellon and other universities in Canada, China, India, the EU and Egypt have pledged to commit a million tomes from their combined digitized book collections to a free, text-based archive to "ensure permanent and public access to our published heritage," according to a statement. We are clearly much closer to the beginning of the campaign to digitize libraries than the end. Still, the herculean task of librarianship and the infusion of books make the Internet a more serious source of authoritative information. There is still time and considerable urgency to make the unique, authoritative public record held by government a primary source online. Citizens expect it, the historic values of transparency demand it, and government will be conspicuous in its absence if it fails to make it so. There is an old bit of librarian humor captured on a bumper sticker that reads, "Free the Bound Periodicals." It is time to do the same for the boxed public record.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/03/2005 11:26:00 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.
