Was glad to see this item in educause, about a recent meeting concerning the establishment of a national digital library. I have followed this idea for a long time, especially during the legal wrangle with Google about the copyright issues with authors and publishers. Google continues its massive book scanning operation. See Google Book Reader for the current status of this work. This has already led to a very large corpus of scanned text from millions of books, which are being used in a number of studies at universities. In addition this same information is readily available to individual researchers as well.
Yet, you do have to wonder if this information should ultimately be owned by any individual company. It would make more sense to have it owned by a consortium that would include Universities, publishers, author groups and other organizations. It is a massive piece of cultural value that should be readily available to all. Today Google is funding the scanning, and makes the content available, but can we be assured that this will always the case? That is precisely what this meeting was about. A good start, with lots more to do.
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