The Universidad Complutense Madrid has become the first library in continental Europe and in a non-English speaking country to join the 2-year-old Google Book Search program. With 3 million volumes, the Complutense Library is the second largest in Spain, following only the National Library....
A well-developed university Web site explaining the program was available immediately....
Complutense is the seventh library to announce a Google Library Project partnership....
Essentially, this means a huge qualitative leap for Complutense’s digitization efforts, which are already claimed to be the largest in Spain and one of the largest in Europe. In addition to electronic versions of theses and journals published in the university, Complutense has the Biblioteca Digital Dioscórides, which offers free public access through the Internet to the full text of a 2,500-volume collection of books (and 40,000 images) in the history of science and the humanities....
With Google, Complutense claims that it will be able to achieve results within its 6-year project that would otherwise require 100 years to reach. Equally important is the lift in carrying out the mission of this important university in the nation’s capital. “It is a unique opportunity to be able to democratize the knowledge that our library houses,” said José Antonio Magán, director of the Complutense library. “For many years libraries have zealously guarded a large and important part of the knowledge of mankind. … Now we are going to open our doors, open our shelves, and throw the books open not only to the street but to the computer.”
Magán suggested that about 10 percent of the library’s holdings will be digitized under this program. This totals 300,000 documents, at least 135,000 of which will be books and journals published before 1866. Works from the Marqués de Valdecilla historical library are first up for scanning. Books from libraries in law, language and literature, and medicine will follow....
Though significant, the Complutense project is not the first large digitization project to make Spanish literature freely available. La Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (BVMC) was inaugurated in July 1999 through a partnership between the University of Alicante and Grupo Santander. It now has a collection of more than 14,000 books, journals, newspapers, and dissertations pertaining to Spain and Latin America....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/09/2006 12:28:00 PM.
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.
