... Decades ago [Rick] Prelinger began collecting what he referred to as “ephemeral” film — educational, industrial, training, high school driver’s ed films, a film of the conversion of a Chrysler factory from making cars to making tanks in World War II — all the filmmaking that’s other than Hollywood. To him, it seemed like a treasure trove of American life and culture.
Prelinger’s efforts grew into the Prelinger Library, a private research library in San Francisco that is open to the public. Its collections encompass some 50,000 books, periodical volumes and ephemera. ...
His library strives to “remake what a library might be,” both physically and in cyberspace. At last count, more than 30 million downloads have been made of Prelinger library holdings, he said. ...
However, much is at stake today, Prelinger said. He worries that the consumer has been left out of the recent Google Book Search settlement, which allows Google to fund a new book rights registry that gives power to the company to digitize books and sell downloads.
“If the Google book deal is approved without any changes, we could soon lose 100 million books that society doesn’t know what to do with,” said Prelinger, referring to “orphan works,” or works under copyright, but whose owner is not known.
The Google agreement is currently under review in a U.S. District Court.
On his Web site, Prelinger writes that U.S. government documents are, by law, in the public domain, as they are produced with taxpayer funds. However, he noted, Google is treating government documents published after 1923 in the same way they are treating non-government material — as potentially copyrighted material.
“This is unnecessarily cautious, and what it means is that only ‘snippets’ are available and the document remains unreadable,” he wrote. ...
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.
