[LIS-Forum] OA gaining momentum, but DC research lagging behind!

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

The Library of Congress in Washington DC has taken the first step to
create the World Digital Library. I give below two news items from Peter
Suber's blog "Open Access News". Brewster Kahle is forging ahead with the
Internet Archive. Carnegie-Mellon University and their partners in India
(led by Balki of IISc) and China are moving forward with their Million
Books Digital Library project. Google, Yahoo and MSN are involved in huge
digitization projects. The potential of the new web technology is being
realised at last.

Led by MIT, Cambridge, many universities around the world (particularly in
China and Japan, but not yet in India) are placing their course material
in the public domain under the Open Course Ware programme.

Many journals have embraced the open access model and more than 500
institutions have set up interoperable institutional open access archives.

Institutions such as UNESCO, ICSU, and CODATA have come out strongly in
favour of open access to information and data. Donor agencies such as the
Wellcome Trust now insist that results of publicly funded research should
be available via open access channels.

These are excellent developments. Experts such as Stevan Harnad, Alma
Swan, Peter Suber and Leslie Chan and legal luminaries such as Lawrence
Lessig have written extensively about the great advantages of going OA.
One wonders why many universities and research laboratories in the
developing world are still not embracing the culture of open access.

Best wishes.

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]

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OA World Digital Library

David A. Vise, World Digital Library Planned, Washington Post, November
22, 2005. Excerpt:

    The Library of Congress is launching a campaign today to create the
World Digital Library, an online collection of rare books,
manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials from its
holdings and those of other national libraries that would be freely
accessible for viewing by anyone, anywhere with Internet access. This
is the most ambitious international effort ever undertaken to put
precious items of artistic, historical, and literary significance on
the Internet so that people can learn about other cultures without
traveling further than the nearest computer, according to James H.
Billington, head of the Library of Congress. Billington said his goal
is to bring together materials from the United States and Europe with
precious items from Islamic nations stretching from Indonesia through
Central and West Africa, as well as important materials from
collections in East and South Asia....Billington said he envisions the
initiative as a public-private partnership. Yesterday, he said that
the Library of Congress has accepted $3 million from Google Inc. as
its first corporate contribution....During the past year, Google has
digitized about 5,000 books from the Library of Congress as part of a
pilot project to refine the techniques to make copies of fragile books
without damaging them. In the next phase of the project, Billington
said Google will digitize books and other materials from the Library
of Congress Law Library....Brin and Billington said Google would only
digitize materials from the Library of Congress that are in the public
domain and therefore not subject to copyright protection. Brin said he
will help raise additional private funds to finance the World Digital
Library. Billington said the $3 million gift from Google will be used
over the next few years to develop the details of the project and pay
for global outreach.





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LOC-Google press release on World Digital Library

The Library of Congress and Google have issued a joint press release on
the World Digital Library (November 22). Excerpt:

    Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey
Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company
to contribute to the Library's initiative to develop a plan to begin
building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries
around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from
nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the
first. The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington
delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO
on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University....In his speech, Billington
proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with
private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of
different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said
that the World Digital Library would bring together online “rare and
unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with
those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and
involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South
Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central
and West Asia to Africa.” Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million
as the first partner in this public-private initiative. Google
Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin said, “Google
supports the World Digital Library because we share a common mission
of making the world's information universally accessible and useful.
To create a global digital library is a historic opportunity, and we
support the Library of Congress in this effort.”...The content of the
World Digital Library, like that of American Memory, will be primarily
one-of-a-kind materials, including manuscript and multimedia materials
of the particular culture....The Library and Google recently completed
a yearlong cooperative digitization of about 5,000 books in the public
domain. The pilot developed procedures for handling and tracking
fragile material as well as developing specifications for high-quality
scanned images. Google will continue its scanning efforts by
digitizing works of historical value from the Library of Congress' Law
Library. In making the announcement, Billington emphasized the
little-known fact that more than one-half of the book collections of
the Library of Congress are in languages other than English. Like the
materials in American Memory, those in the World Digital Library will
either be in the public domain or made available with special
permission. “A World Digital Library would make these collections
available free of charge to anyone accessing the Internet, and it
could well have the salutary effect of bringing people together by
celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single
global undertaking,” said Billington. “We are grateful for Google's
contribution to this important initiative, and we will seek
contributions from other private sector companies with an equally
enlightened self-interest.