Members of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have announced that they are partnering with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to build a freely accessible digital library. TRLN is a collaborative organisation of the research libraries at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
With this partnership, the TRLN libraries seek to ensure that their online collections remain open to scholars and all other members of the global community. Administered by the non-profit Internet Archive, the OCA represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organisations worldwide helping to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitised text and multimedia content.
In the first year, UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University will each convert 2,700 public domain books into high-resolution, downloadable, reusable digital files that can be indexed locally and by any web search engine. UNC Chapel Hill and NCSU will start by each hosting one high-tech Scribe machine provided by the Internet Archive to scan the materials at a cost of 10 cents per page. Each university library will focus on historic collection strengths, such as plant and animal sciences, engineering and physical science at NCSU and social sciences and humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill. Duke University will also contribute select content for digitisation during the first year of the collaborative project.
Seventy percent of the titles held within TRLN are unique to a single institution. Cooperative digitisation through efforts such as the OCA offer the opportunity to expand access to and use of the extensive research collections held within TRLN. Through the OCA partnership, TRLN is also working to develop shared principles for digitisation and the long-term preservation of digitised content.
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