Open Content Alliance Contrasted to Google

Jeffrey Young has a good article on the Open Content Alliance in the Chron this week. The selectivity of the digitization effort and the openness of the process is a contrast to the Google Book Search library project. So is the Alliance’s approach to the whole copyright question – they are not digitizing books that are copyrighted without permission, avoiding the whole fair use question while providing an alternative approach to creating a quality digital library. Check out some of the books that have been digitized thus far.

Author: Barbara Fister

I'm an academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Like all librarians at our small, liberal arts institution I am involved in reference, collection development, and shared management of the library. My area of specialization is instruction, with research interests also in media literacy, popular literacy, publishing, and assessment.

4 thoughts on “Open Content Alliance Contrasted to Google”

  1. Speaking for the Internet Archive: when we scan a book we harvest MARC data, usually from the OPAC of the contributing library. If that isn’t available, we query LC or RLG. A MARC XML file and a binary MARC file are generated, both of which live in the directory where the scanned pages and derivative reading formats reside.

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