= [Overview]
Conceived by the Internet Archive to offer a universal public
digital library, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched
in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit
and governmental organizations willing to build a permanent
archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.
The project took off in 2006, with the digitization of public
domain books around the world. Unlike Google Books, the Open
Content Alliance (OCA) has made them searchable through any web
search engine, and has not scanned copyrighted books, except
when the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The
first contributors to OCA were the University of California,
the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National
Archives in United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and the Prelinger
Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the
Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. In December 2008,
one million ebooks were posted under OCA principles by the
Internet Archive.
= [In Depth]
The Internet Archive and Yahoo! conceived the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) in early 2005 to offer broad public access to
the world culture. The OCA also wanted to address the issues of
the Google Book project, with its copyright issues and its
availability from one search engine only. The OCA was launched
with the goal of digitizing only public domain books and making
them searchable and downloadable through any search engine.
What exactly is the Internet Archive? Founded in April 1996 by
Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit
organization that has built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format
for researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web
is stored every two months or so. In late 1999, the Internet
Archive started to include more collections of archived
webpages on specific topics. It also became an online digital
library of text, audio, software, image and video content. In
October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet
Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to
surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300
terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month.
There were 65 billion pages (from 50 million websites) in 2006
and 85 million pages in 2008. The Internet Archive now defines
itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing
universal access to human knowledge."
In October 2005, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) with other contributors as a collective effort
for "building a digital archive of global content for universal
access" (subtitle of the OCA home page) that would be a
permanent repository of multilingual text and multimedia
content.
As explained on its website in 2007, the OCA "is a
collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology,
nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world
that helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized
text and multimedia material. An archive of contributed
material is available on the Internet Archive website and
through Yahoo! and other search engines and sites. The OCA
encourages access to and reuse of collections in the archive,
while respecting the content owners and contributors."
The project aims at digitizing public domain books around the
world and make them searchable through any web search engine
and downloadable for free. Unlike Google Books, the OCA scans
and digitizes only public domain books, except when the
copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first
contributors to the OCA were the University of California, the
University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National
Archives in United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger
Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the
Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. 100,000 ebooks
were publicly available in December 2006 (with 12,000 new
ebooks added per month), 200,000 ebooks in May 2007, and one
million ebooks in December 2008.
Microsoft has been one of the partners of the OCA, while also
developing its own project. The beta version of Live Search
Books was released in December 2006, with a search possible by
keyword for non copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft in
partner libraries. The British Library and the libraries of the
universities of California and Toronto were the first ones to
join in, followed in January 2007 by the New York Public
Library and Cornell University. Books offered full text views
and could be downloaded in PDF files. In May 2007, Microsoft
announced agreements with several publishers, including
Cambridge University Press and McGraw Hill, for their books to
be available in Live Search Books. After digitizing 750,000
books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft ended
the Live Search Books program in May 2008, to focus on other
activities, and closed the website. These books are available
in the OCA collections of the Internet Archive.
A main issue for digital libraries is the lack of proofreading
of digitized books, that ensures a better accuracy of the text
without any loss from the print version. The only digital
library proofreading its books has been Project Gutenberg, with
28,000 high-quality ebooks available in January 2009. Good OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) software run on image files -
obtained from scanning print pages - is said to ensure 99%
accuracy. If the step of the proofreading seems essential to
Project Gutenberg, whose goal is to reach a 99.99% accuracy for
its ebooks - above the 99.95% accuracy set up as a standard for
Library of Congress -, this step is skipped by the Internet
Archive, the OCA, Google and many others. Some R&D teams work
on better quality OCR technology, which means that they would
have to go back to the original image files to provide a higher
quality book in the future, if they do want to provide digital
versions without any loss from the print version.