[The Library of Congress (LC)] has launched an initiative to build a World Digital Library (WDL). Its first partner is Google, which has made a $3 million contribution. In contrast to the Google Book Search and Open Content Alliance strategies of digitizing all books, the WDL project will focus on digitizing “rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures.” Along with books, the WDL will cover documents, video, audio, manuscripts, etc. Funding and content will come from public and private partnerships, with both U.S. and international participation. The WDL expands on LC’s Global Gateway, begun in 2000, by broadening the geographic scope to non-Western nations and cultures and focusing on the cultures and histories of those nations. The Global Gateway focuses on materials reflecting the historical intersections between contributing countries, and the U.S. Google’s contribution will help fund the initial planning stages for the project....The Library of Congress has long pioneered digitization, in part as a function of its preservation efforts. It has already built major digital libraries involving extensive digitization, especially of fragile material (e.g., the American Memory project begun in 1990, which launched into a Web site program in 1994 as part of the National Digital Library Program). The American Memory Web site now includes more than 10 million rare and unique materials supplied by LC and its partners. The U.S. Congress has also mandated LC to take a leadership role in forming the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), a network of institutional partners working to build a digital preservation architecture for collecting, preserving, and making accessible material only available in digital form....None of the arrangements involve payments to Google. LC representatives also indicated that the Library is considering working with the Open Content Alliance as well as Google....As for its experience with international coverage, more than half of LC’s existing book collection consists of non-English language books. The Global Gateway Web site contains multilingual content and multimedia presentations that include contributions from repositories in Russia, Spain, Brazil, the Netherlands, and France. LC representatives expect WDL to build on the Global Gateway partnerships and hope someday all national libraries will participate....Library of Congress inclusion policies for its digital collections such as American Memory require all items to be free of copyright, either because they fall into the public domain or they have become available due to special permission. Novak said that, in the case of the American Memory collection, many outlets have not only linked to its content but have taken it and, in some cases, produced CD-ROMs for sale. It is yet to be decided how policies will change when dealing with the world’s national libraries, as LC hopes to do with the WDL project. However, Billington’s goals aim at the broadest possible access. "The World Digital Library would make these collections available free of charge to anyone accessing the Internet."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/28/2005 08:06:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
