Anonymous Patron writes “The race is on? Information World Review reports Ten major international libraries have agreed to combine their digitised book collections into a free text-based archive hosted online by the not-for-profit Internet Archive. All content digitised and held in the text archive will be freely available to online users. Two major US libraries have agreed to join the scheme: Carnegie Mellon University library and The Library of Congress have committed their Million Book Project and American Memory Projects, respectively, to the text archive. The projects both provide access to digitised collections.
The Canadian universities of Toronto, Ottawa and McMaster have agreed to add their collections, as have China’s Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Science, the European Archives and Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
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see? good thing.
I’ve never been a big believer in the Invisible Hand, but I do believe in competition. This story is a prime example of why some of the anti-google hype is just flat-out wrong.
Of course CMU wants to be known as a library at the cutting edge, and if Harvard’s going to team up with google, this seems like an excellent way for CMU to keep up. It’s an interesting side effect of our academic system that universities can increase their standing (and therefore attract more money, power, etc.) by giving things away. My main surprise in this whole story has been that Harvard ever figured that out.
And kudos to the Library of Congress for being a part of this.
Re:see? good thing.
Harvard will never figure out that giving things away would be good for it. For the Library of Congress, OTOH, this seems like a natural extension and enhancement of things they’re doing anyway.