[T]he French have organized several initiatives designed to one-up the Yanks. You'll remember, of course, the digitization project undertaken by the French National Library which was designed to counter Google's own plan to index millions of English-language books. The project, dubbed Gallica, is great if you want to access manuscript images of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu from the comfort of your living room, but not for much else. Gallica has only 80,000 images online so far, and none of these are searchable by content. While the idea has merit and may turn into an incredible resource, its current incarnation leaves much to be desired and has basically failed to enhance Europe's reputation as a digital pioneer.
Update (1/13/06). Klaus Graf writes to say that Anderson is wrong on every point. According to Gallica's page of Documents Available Online, "Today, this digital library includes more than 75,000 volumes of digitized texts, 70,000 still images, and 30 hours of sound recordings....About 1,250 works in text format have been placed online...." And from a January 10 story in PC Inpact, "On estime d’ores et déjà que dans le cadre d’une numérisation massive, ce sont entre 50 et 60 000 ouvrages qui seront traités fin 2006, estime Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Président de la Bibliothèque nationale de France." (Thanks, Klaus.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/12/2006 10:06:00 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.
