[Overview]
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was conceived by the Internet Archive
in early 2005 to offer broad, public access to the world culture. It
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 aims at digitizing public domain books around the world and
make them searchable through any web search engine and downloadable for
free. Unlike the Google Print project, the OCA scans and digitizes only
public domain 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 the United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger
Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the Text
Archive of the Internet Archive. In December 2006, they reached a
milestone of 100,000 digitalized books publicly available, with 12,000
new books added per month. Two years later, in December 2008, one
million books were "posted under OCA principles or otherwise public
domain hosted by the Internet Archive."