Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:13:44 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends:
The 'Open Access' movement is picking up worldwide.
As one aspect of the OA movement, many large libraries in the western
world, especially in the United States of America, are digitizing their
collections and making them available free on the Internet. The latest to
join this movement is the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
When will we in India start offering books and periodicals in Indian
languages - Samskrit, Pali, Tamil, Teleugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya,
Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarathi, Hindi, Urdu, etc. - for free viewing
(and downloading) on the Internet? Do our public libraries have a policy
on open access? Should not organizations such as CDAC and HP India, Google
India play an active role in digitizing Indian language content available
with major libraries?
Many universities around the world (including some in China) led by MIT,
Cambridge, are making their course material freely available on the
Internet under the 'Open Course Ware' project. Some are offering even
video files of lectures by eminent teachers. In order to become a
knowledge society, India needs to provide such access to high quality
university course material. Incidentally, Indians are among the most avid
users of the MIT open course ware.
Arun
Wisconsin joins the Google Library project
UW-Madison joins massive Google Book project, a press release from the
University of Wisconsin, October 12, 2006. Excerpt:
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google announced an agreement
today to expand access to hundreds of thousands of public and historical
books and documents from more than 7.2 million holdings at the UW-Madison
Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library.
The university is the eighth library to join Google's ambitious effort
to digitize the world's books and make them searchable on Google Book
Search.
The combined library collections of UW-Madison and the Wisconsin
Historical Society comprise one of the largest collections of documents
and historical materials to be found in the United States. The collections
are ranked 11th in North America by the Association of Research Libraries
in Washington, D.C.
"Wisconsin is in a position to take a leading role in making the primary
documents of U.S. government history freely accessible on the Internet for
anyone to find and use," says UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell.
Adds Edward Van Gemert, interim director of the UW-Madison General
Library System: "Whenever possible, the university intends to make the
complete content of public documents available on the Internet, including
text, images and maps." ...
The Wisconsin project will initially focus on library collections that
are free of copyright restrictions. Most books published before 1923 and
publications of the U.S. government are in the public domain by law....
