[Summary]
Starting with an idea from the Internet Archive, the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) was launched in October 2005 as a global effort from a
group of cultural, technology, non profit, and governmental
organizations to build “a digital archive of global content for
universal access” and offer a permanent repository of multilingual text
and multimedia content. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in the
Internet Archive in December 2006, with 12,000 new ebooks posted per
month. Unlike Google Books, OCA books are searchable and downloadable
through any web search engine, and don’t include copyrighted books,
unless 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. One million ebooks
were available in the Internet Archive in December 2008, and two
million ebooks in March 2010.
***
Starting with an idea from the Internet Archive, the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) was launched in October 2005 as a effort to build “a
digital archive of global content for universal access”.
The goal was to offer a permanent repository of multilingual text and
multimedia content. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in the
Internet Archive in December 2006, with 12,000 new ebooks posted per
month.
What exactly is the Internet Archive? Founded in April 1996 by Brewster
Kahle in San Francisco, California, 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 has been
stored every two months or so since 1996, and has been freely available
through the Wayback Machine since October 2001. As "a nonprofit digital
library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge",
the Internet Archive has also become a digital library of text, audio,
software, image and video content.
As explained in 2007 on the OCA website, 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."
Unlike Google Books, OCA books are searchable and downloadable through
any web search engine, and don’t include copyrighted books, unless 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.
In 2006, Microsoft, while being one of the OCA partners, began
developing its own digital library. The beta version of Microsoft Live
Search Books was released in December 2006, with a collection of non
copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft in partner libraries. The
first partner libraries were the British Library and the libraries of
the Universities of California and Toronto, followed in January 2007 by
the New York Public Library and Cornell University Library. Books
offered full text views, with a search by keyword, and could be
downloaded as PDF files. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements
with several publishers, for example 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 and
closed the website. All the digitized books were transferred into the
OCA collection of the Internet Archive.
The OCA collection offered one million books in December 2008, and two
million books in March 2010.