[Web4lib] Open Content Alliance announced

[Karen Coyle]

I look at this and I begin to wonder what it means to "provide digital 
versions of books, etc." Google seems to have set themselves a very 
well-defined scope of indexing and displaying "snippets." This means 
they don't have to worry about providing a book-like experience or to 
provide for downloading, format shifting, and a whole host of other 
things. This project appears to attempt to replicate the library 
collection in digital form, which is a much larger task, and one with 
additional technical and user service challenges.

I also wish that Brewster hadn't said: "... by the time my kid goes to 
college, we could have a library system that is just astonishing." 
GONG!  Brewster, we HAVE a library system that is just astonishing. I 
really want to insert the word digital in there, revisionistically.

kc

Roy Tennant wrote:

> "The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with  
> several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books,  
> academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist  
> of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and  
> authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search  
> content.
>
> Other participants in the alliance announced Monday include Adobe  
> Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., the Internet Archive, O'Reilly  
> Media Inc., the University of California and the University of Toronto."
>
> More at:
>
> NYTimes article: <http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP- 
> Online-Book-Project.html>
> Project Web Site: <http://www.opencontentalliance.org/>
> UC Press Release: <http://www.opencontentalliance.org/UC.pdf>
>
> Roy Tennant
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> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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