[Web4lib] RE: More on the Open Content Alliance

[Lars Aronsson]

Richard Wiggins wrote:
> Try a thought experiment: if, say, the NSF gave a major research
> library a $200M grant to do its own book digitization project,
> wouldn't you expect that tools and techniques developed as part of the
> project would be shared in scholarly papers and conferences, to the
> benefit of any other library that wants to do likewise?

Have you heard of any digitization project that documented its
process in full detail?  Is that the rule or the exception?

Where does the $200M figure come from?

NSF in its 1994-1998 Digital Library Initiative phase 1 (DLI-1) 
gave funding to the University of Michigan for doing the Making of 
America and to Stanford for doing research that led to Google. 
JSTOR isn't free of charge, the Making of America for very long 
didn't publish its OCR files, and the Michigan scanning process is 
not described in detail in the open.  Google Print is the 
combination of these two DLI-1 projects.


--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se