With a $5-million commitment, Microsoft's MSN Search division is joining universities and its online-search rival Yahoo in a consortium dedicated to scanning millions of public-domain books. The company's pledge will pay for the scanning of 150,000 volumes. The consortium, called the Open Content Alliance, was announced three weeks ago....Since then, 14 more universities have also joined, promising to contribute money, books, or services to the project. The original members of the alliance include the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies....Danielle Tiedt, a general manager at MSN, said the company believed it was a good idea to join with rivals in the alliance to scan books, so that books would not be scanned repeatedly by competing companies and so that Microsoft could focus its energies on improving its search technology. The company also announced that it would create a new service, called MSN Book Search, that is scheduled to begin next year....The company has not yet decided which books it will scan, Ms. Tiedt said, adding that the books might belong to institutions that are not members of the alliance. "We're committed to 150,000, but we're completely free to choose where those books come from," she said. "We're not constricted to just working with people within the Open Content Alliance." That rival companies are joining the alliance is evidence that the project is "fundamentally a mechanism of sharing," said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that is coordinating the book scanning for the alliance. "An open library allows lots of people to participate," he added.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/27/2005 11:57:00 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.
