Technology firm Microsoft Corp., US, and Columbia University are collaborating on an initiative to digitise a large number of books from Columbia University Libraries and make them available to Internet users. With the support of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), publicly available print materials in Columbia Libraries will be scanned, digitised, and indexed to make them readily accessible through Live Search Books.
The initiative will allow students, researchers, and scholars to have global access to books in the public domain from the Libraries' collections via Live Search Books. Published material in digital libraries offers an alternative and reliable source of information to that gleaned from general web searches.
Columbia University Libraries is playing a key role in book selection and in setting quality standards for the digitised materials. Microsoft will digitise selected portions of the Libraries' great collections of American history, literature, and humanities works, with the specific areas to be decided mutually by both parties during the early phase of the project. Microsoft will give the Library high-quality digital images of all the materials, allowing the Library to provide worldwide access through its own digital library and to share the content with non-commercial academic initiatives and non-profit organisations.
Columbia University and Microsoft are partners in the OCA, along with the Boston Library Consortium, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Toronto among others. The alliance, which has made open access a core component of its mission, is scanning only out-of-copyright materials.
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