Imagine a library where the world's greatest books are available to anyone at the click of a button. The University, through its support of a group called the Open Content Alliance, is working to make that goal a reality by pledging this week to provide digital content to the OCA's effort, according to University library officials.
The OCA's goal is to create a large online library of text and multimedia content from around the world.
"We were contacted by the Open Content Alliance recently and agreed to participate and to make available those full text humanities books and special collections material that we have already digitized," said Charlotte Morford, director of communications for the University Library.
As stated in the OCA's press release, the alliance was founded by a company called Internet Archive and includes Microsoft and Yahoo!. In addition to University support, the effort also has gained the backing of several other universities, including the University of California, Columbia University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Despite broad support for the project, similar initiatives to create public digital libraries, such as a recent attempt by Google, have encountered legal problems with copyright issues.
Ross Wayland, Associate Director of the University's Digital Library Research and Development Department, said copyright disputes are common when creating digital libraries.
"Licensing and copyright are some of the big hurdles," Wayland said.
Wayland is involved in a University effort, distinct from the OCA project, to create appropriate software to digitize library content.
While licensing is an issue when digitizing content, Morford said the University's contribution to the OCA project will be material that has previously been digitized and is not under copyright restrictions.
"These books are already publicly available through our E-text center, which was one of the first efforts to digitize and make available books that are in public domain," Murford said. "What the E-text center does is digitized things that are out of copyright, in other words pre-1923, and the same for the special collections materials."
According to Morford, the University's involvement in the project is an attempt to make its collections accessible for as many people as possible.
"I think that any effort that gives these digital books that are already available to the public an even wider audience is a good thing," Morford said.
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