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Open Content Alliance
Open Content Alliance

OCA hiring an Executive Director

The Open Content Alliance is seeking an experienced individual for the role of Executive Director. This individual will become the leader and public face of a vital association of nearly 100 cultural and academic institutions that are working to build joint online collections and engage in activities that support the open sharing of information.
Learn More

 

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web

New York Times, October 22, 2007 - Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

 

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
Read the whole article

 

Libraries Going Open!


This movie may be downloaded from Internet Archive and shared.

The Open Content Alliance's annual meeting was held yesterday, October 17, 2007 in San Francisco. This movie was shown during the evening presentations. We would like to thank all of the OCA members and other guests who attended and made the day such a success.
Read about OCA programs

 

Boston Library Consortium Partners with Open Content Alliance to Provide Public Access to Digitized Books

The Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC) announced today that it will partner with the Open Content Alliance to build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions. The BLC is the first large-scale consortium to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the Open Content Alliance. The BLC's digitization efforts will be based in a new scanning center, the Northeast Regional Scanning Center, unveiled today at the Boston Public Library.
Read the Press Release.

 

$350,000 Grant for Open Library Project

Internet Archive receives $350,000 grant for its Open Library project from the State of California under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Program

 

OCA Annual Meeting to be held October 17th

The OCA Annual Meeting will be oriented toward discussing book scanning, sharing and integrating bibliographic records and implementing digital ILL (Scan on Demand).
View the meeting agenda.

 

University of Illinois announces availability of Lincoln Books

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

From Betsy Kruger, January 26, 2007.

 

University of Pittsburgh to digitize Darlington Library

The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) has started a project to digitize and make freely available the holdings of the Darlington Memorial Library. The library contains one of the finest private libraries amassed west of the Allegheny Mountains during the 19th century. The collection focuses primarily on early American history, especially as it pertains to Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley. For example, the Darlington collection holds 11 of the 13 Indian treaties printed by Benjamin Franklin at his shop in Philadelphia between 1736 and 1762.

To complete the project, ULS created an advanced scanning center within its Digital Research Library. ULS is a member of the Open Content Alliance, so, as contents of the Darlington Library become digitized, ULS will contribute the resources to the Internet Archive as well as deliver them through its own Web Portal.

From C&RL News, January 2007.

 

Sloan Foundation Grant Awarded

The Sloan Foundation announced today, that it has awarded $1 million to the Internet Archive to to help pay for digital copies of collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, Johns-Hopkins Libraries and the Bancroft Library of the University of California. - 2006 December 19.

 

  • Milestone Achieved

    The Internet Archive announced on December 20, 2006 that it had achived a milestone in having digitized and made available to date, a total of 100,000 books on its servers. The bulk of these books are from members of the Open Content Alliance. All are available without restriction to public access and enjoyment. A copy of the press release can be seen at the right. Within hours of the release, over 60 news organizations had picked up the AP newswire story. Congratulations to all!

     

    CNN.com
    Google library: open culture?

    http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/12/19/google.books.ap

    Seattle PI
    A countercrusade to Google's crusade

    http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/296561_digitallibrary20.html

    KESQ
    Google's book-scanning efforts trigger philosophical debate

    http://www.kesq.com/Global/story.asp?S=5837749&nav=9qrx

     

     

    What is the Open Content Alliance?

    The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

    The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors. Contributors to the OCA must agree to the principles set forth in the Call for Participation.

  • Open Content Alliance is a trademark of the Internet Archive Internet Archive.