Rachel Deahl, Google Isn't the Only Digitizer in Town, Book Standard, June 02, 2005. Excerpt: 'Google is not the only player in the [book] digitization game. A number of other organizations, mostly academic institutions and other non-profits are digitizing books as diligently, if a bit more quietly, than Google. [Ed] McCoyd [Director of Digital Policy at the Association of American Publishers] said most publishers are not focused on these mostly non-commercial efforts, but they remain an interesting component of the effort to bring books to a computer screen near you. [1] Carnegie Mellon's Million Book Project, also known as The Universal Library: a non-profit academic effort with the goal of putting a million books online, freely searchable, by 2007. Gloriana Sinclaire, Dean of Carnegie Mellon's University Library, says the program currently has 125,000 books digitized and available on the web. Launched four years ago, and funded by the National Science Foundation, The Universal Library is primarily focused on digitizing books in the public domain, though it does feature some more recent titles (most from university presses). [2] Project Gutenberg: another not-for-profit digitization effort (the brainchild of Michael Hart), an online collection of ebooks that traces its history back to 1971. Like The Universal Library, the interface at Project Gutenberg is significantly lower-tech than Google Print’s offering—Google allows readers to digitally flip through books (replicating any art and fonts) whereas both Project Gutenberg and The Universal Library offer text versions that don't have pages numbers, much less virtual bindings --the goal of Project Gutenberg is to disseminate texts as freely as possible. [3] The University of California and the University of Virginia: two universities that have digitized their collections on their own, amassing a significant online libraries, as opposed to joining the Google Print for Libraries initiative. [4] And not all publishers have abandoned the DIY model, either. The National Academies Press has digitized many of its own titles, making them viewable on its website, with purchasing options. While such efforts from publishers remain the exception to the rule --McCoyd said he hadn't heard of any publishers digitizing their own titles-- the strategy may become commonplace in the future.'
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.
