In an announcement last week, Boston Public Library President Bernard Margolis said that in choosing book-scanning by the Open Content Alliance, “we are doing what libraries are supposed to do.” The announcement explains:
The Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC) today announced a major partnership with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to “build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions.” With the move, the BLC becomes the first large-scale consortium to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the OCA. The effort will draw on the vast collective resources of the BLC members to make “high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials,” using Internet Archive technology, for roughly ten cents a page. The scanning center for the BLC/OCA partnership is located at the Boston Public Library (BPL).
The announcement comes shortly after OCA founder Brewster Kahle told Library Journal that Boston Public Library officials had chosen not to pursue the chance to participate in commercial projects, choosing instead to work with OCA. “Revolutions aren’t started by majorities,” Kahle said. “They come from leaders who see things that need to be done. Boston Public Library, for example, has been courted by Google, but it has said it is going to remain open.”
Doron Weber, program director, Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge, at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a financial supporter of the OCA since its inception, also praised the BLC. “Unlike corporate-backed efforts by Google, Microsoft, Amazon et al, which all impose different, albeit understandable, levels of restriction,” Weber said, “the BLC has shown libraries all across the country the right way to take institutional responsibility and manage this historic transition to a universal digital archive that serves the needs of scholars, researchers and the general public without compromise.” BPL President Bernard Margolis said, succinctly, “we are doing what libraries are supposed to do.”
Full announcement
Via Chronicle of Higher Education
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