Yahoo forms consortium to digitise world's archives

By Steve Malone

Posted on 4 Oct 2005 at 10:27

Internet portal Yahoo! has finally made its response to the Google Print initiative. Together with Hewlett-Packard and Adobe, a number of the world's top libraries and archives have come together to form the Open Content Alliance.

Initially, the material for the archive will come from the University of California, the University of Toronto, the British National Archives, O'Reilly Media, Inc., and the European Archive.

Funding for the project will come from the founding members. However it is hoped that other institutions, philanthropic agencies and even governments may contribute as a way of helping their own archives to reach the public domain.

According to founding member, the University of California, its library books will be digitised by the Internet Archive using a new technology that scans books at the cost of 10 cents per page. Previously the cost of scanning photographs and documents was in the region at $20.00 per page.

The scanning technology will be provided by Hewlett Packard and the documents will be available through the opencontentalliance.org website. Documents will be made available in Adobe PDF and other popular formats. Naturally the site will be searchable using Yahoo! technology.

The alliance's approach is hoping to avoid the problems that have plagued the rival Google Print in that it will ask for a copyright holder's permission before digitising their material. With the copyright holder's consent, material may be distributed through a Creative Commons licence which encourages personal use, reuse and repurposing of digital content. The alliance says it is actively encouraging copyright holders and other archives and libraries to contact them so that their material can be added to the site.

Last month, three authors with the backing of the US Authors Guild sued Google Print for alleged copyright infringement. The involvement of the European Archive will also go some way to allay the fears of France and other European nations that have feared the world's digital archives would become overwhelmingly Anglophonic.