Friends: Here is a statement from Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance. After its first year, OCA has now scanned and cataloged over 30,000 books, available on its site. Today, OCA scans about 500 books a day and expects output to increase tenfold by the end of 2007. OCA partners include Yahoo!, the University of California, the British Library, Smithsonian Institution, University of Illinois, Boston Library Consortium, European Archive, O'Reilly Media, Research Library Group, as well as many other academic, technological, non-profit, and government organizations. Perhaps most importantly, Kahle said the OCA discussions honed in on the "open" in the Open Content Alliance. For OCA, the effort is more than a race to scan library book content for a commercial index, but extends to the use of that content. With OCA, "public domain means public domain," Kahle noted. "That was one of the 'aha' moments, that open as we know it may not be open enough and that the digitized public domain must be public domain. Libraries understand this; so does Yahoo." That means, Kahle says, once public domain books are scanned, there are "no restrictions at all on users, and anyone can build any service on top of it." --- Which libraries in India and other countries in the global Soth would like to join the Open Content Allince? In a knowledge-based world initiatives such as OCA and institutional repositoriers play a very important role. Regards. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com