Open Content Libraries

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[edit] Introduction

There have been many millions of different books, articles, and other print materials published since the invention of writing. Some have been so completely lost that it is unlikely that copies will ever be found. Many are out of copyright and thus could be made available as open source library materials. Many others are still in copyright, but are out of print and not readily available. There is a movement toward making some of these available on the Web. Of course, there are a huge and steadily growing number of print materials that are commercially available.

There are a number of ongoing projects to make library book types of materials available on the Web. Some of these provide free access, while others charge to access the materials. The amount of free materials available is steadily growing.

This IAE-pedia page lists and briefly discusses some of the major free sources of information. Readers are encouraged to add to this page. In many cases, the work in creating the collections listed below is being done by volunteers.

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The Heart of the Matter

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The following is quoted from Article 26:

  1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
  2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

This document does not speak to the quality of the education that is to be made available. Nor does it attempt to deal with details of what might constitute a good education.

This Web Page is based on two assumptions:

  1. That all people of the world are entitled to a free, good quality education. Good quality is to be determined by contemporary standards; however, it should prepare students to become and remain responsible citizens and lifelong learners who can adjust to life in a changing world.
  2. This education should be designed to empower learners by helping them gain levels of expertise in diverse areas that meet their own specific needs and interests, the needs and interests of their community, and the needs and interests of the world.

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An Example: Flatland, an Out of Copyright Book

When I was a child, I greatly enjoyed reading Edwin A Abbott’s book “Flatland.” It is now out of copyright and the illustrated 1884 version is available free on the Web. Perhaps you remember this delightful book from you childhood. Quoting from the beginning of the story:

I CALL our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows - only hard and with luminous edges - and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

[edit] Encyclopedia of Life: World Species Project

Many people have been working on pieces of this Encyclopedia of Life project for many years. The current idea is to join forces and fill in the gaps. The goal is to create an encyclopedia of all earth’s 1.8 million known species. The information will be available free on the Web and organized to serve the needs of both researchers and students.

The Encyclopedia of Life project is representative of efforts to collect and organize the knowledge of entire disciplines. On a large project such as this, governmental funding and the cooperation of many organizations are a standard approach.

[edit] Google Books

The Google Books Library Project is working to digitize many millions of books. Quoting from their Website:

When you click on a search result for a book from the Library Project, you'll see basic bibliographic information about the book, and in many cases, a few snippets – a few sentences showing your search term in context. If the book is out of copyright, you’ll be able to view and download the entire book. In all cases, you'll see links directing you to online bookstores where you can buy the book and libraries where you can borrow it.

The Google project is by far the largest of the digitization projects. Its current intent is to make perhaps 30 million books available in a full-text searchable format. This effort is contributing to an up to date analysis of copyright laws. There are huge numbers of books that are out of print and no longer generating royalties for their authors, but are still protected by copyright. It will be interesting to whether the copyright laws are changed to make such books more readily available to the public.

Here is a reference giving some insights into the Google project:

Schaffhauser, Dian (1/1/002008). Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly. Campus Technology. Retrieved 2/1/08: http://campustechnology.com/articles/57064/. Quoting from the article:

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE about Google's book digitization project. Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved-you'll find that Book Search (from the fifth most valuable company in America) is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude. It doesn't even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities.

[edit] Internet Archive, San Francisco

The Internet Archive, San Francisco is developing its own collection and it also provides access to a large amount of online open source materials provided by others. Quoting from http://www.opencontentalliance.org/:

The Internet Archive announced on December 20, 2006 that it had achieved a milestone in having digitized and made available to date, a total of 100,000 books on its servers. The bulk of these books are from members of the Open Content Alliance. All are available without restriction to public access and enjoyment.

[edit] Internet Public Library

The Internet Public Library is a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment founded at the University of Michigan School of Information and now hosted by Drexel University's College of Information Science & Technology. Quoting from a question and answer section of their Website:

What is the IPL?
A good question. The IPL is many things:
  • the first public library of and for the Internet community
  • an experiment, trying to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa
  • a group of highly talented, creative, strong-willed people, working hard

The IPL project includes an Ask a Question feature through which trained professional librarian volunteers and graduate students in library science programs will respond to your question. Quoting from the Website:

How long will it take to get an answer?
Once we have accepted your question, we do our best to answer it promptly. You will receive an answer from us within one week. If you indicate you need a response more quickly, we will try to answer it by that date.
The IPL is not a good place to come if you need help right away. We are not a “real-time” service, and it takes us time to read, research, and respond to questions. If you need help right away, try your local library or some of the other resources listed on our site.

What kind of answer will I get?
IPL answers include resources you can use to learn about your topic, and they include a description of how we found those resources. We focus on finding authoritative, free sources you can access online. The IPL is not part of a physical library, so we don’t own books, magazines, databases, etc. That means we cannot send copies of materials such as articles or book chapters, but we may refer you to those materials and recommend you visit a local library to use them.

[edit] Million Book Project

The Million Book project at Carnegie Mellon was initiated by Raj Reddy. As of April 9. 2007 the project had exceeded its initial goal of digitizing one million books. Quoting from http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html#current:

Leveraging the $3,000,000 provided by the National Science Foundation for equipment and travel, the Million Book Project attracted international partners and matching funds exceeding $100 million U.S. dollars. To date the Project has scanned over 1.4 million books in China, India and Egypt, and made great strides in research areas relevant to large-scale, multi-lingual database storage and retrieval.

Quoting from a November 27, 2007 report:

The Million Book Project, an effort led by Carnegie Mellon University to create an online library, has digitized 1.5-million books and made half of them freely available online, according to a statement released today by the university.
Most of the scanning, digitization, and cataloging of the books takes place in China and India. Zhejiang University, in China; the Indian Institute of Science, in India; and the Library at Alexandria, in Egypt, are partners in the program. It is part of a growing movement to provide free academic material online.

[edit] National Science Digital Library

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) was created by the National Science Foundation to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

[edit] Online Books Page

The Online Books Page of the University of Pennsylvania provides more than 25,000 free books available on the Web.

[edit] Open Content Alliance

Quoting from the home page of the Open Content Alliance:

What is the Open Content Alliance? The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.
What is in the OCA archive? The OCA archive will contain globally sourced digital collections, including multimedia content, representing the creative output of humankind.
How can users find OCA content? All content in the OCA archive will be available through the website. In addition, Yahoo! will index all content stored by the OCA to make it available to the broadest set of Internet users. Finally, the OCA supports efforts by others to create and offer tools such as finding aids, catalogs, and indexes that will enhance the usability of the materials in the archive.

Quoting from a 9/28/07 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Open Content Alliance, Brewster Kahle’s alternative to Google’s much-discussed book-scanning project, announced this week that it would digitize public-domain material from the 19 institutions in the Boston Library Consortium.
The alliance was created in 2005 by Mr. Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who has criticized Google’s digitizing project for scanning snippets of copyrighted texts and for tying material to its own search engine. Books scanned by the Open Content Alliance are public-domain texts that can be scanned in full and indexed by every search engine.
Mr. Kahle and his corporate sponsors, including Adobe, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard, haven’t grabbed as many headlines as Google, but they appear to be making steady progress. About 40 institutions have signed on, and pages are being digitized at six scanning centers across the country.

Here is another good reference.

Eschool News (Nov 12, 2007).Google's book scanning faces competition: Open Content Alliance triggers philosophical debate over access to digital material. Accessed 11/19/07: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=50345;_hbguid=030eb01f-e4f0-461d-a3e7-c59096a4c9e8.

[edit] Project Gutenberg

There are over 20,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. A grand total of over 100,000 titles is available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

Languages with more than 50 books: Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog.

Listen to a radio broadcast discussing Project Gutenberg.

[edit] Questia

Read more than5,000 books_for FREE. These are all books that are out of copyright. The list includes such classics as "A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis" by Sigmund Freud, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll, "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, and "Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

[edit] The Open Library

The Open Library is a step toward creating a virtual library "that makes all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world." The vision of this project is to create free access to important book collections from around the world. Continuing to quote from their Website:

The Open Library is built by librarians to create comprehensive collections with finding aids. Since The Open Library isn't limited to a single library's or librarian's selections, it represents many points of view. We can create new virtual collections that never existed in physical form.
…

Ultimately, we would like The Open Library to include all books. But for the moment, a selective, collections-oriented approach will help us build a bibliographically coherent collection of immediate use to educators, researchers, and the public.

[edit] U.S. Library of Congress National Digital Library

The United States Library of Congress is committing significant resources to build its digital collections. As of 2007, the National Digital Library contained about 11 million digitized documents. Quoting from the library’s 2003 long range planning document:

The Congress of the United States has been the greatest patron of a library in the history of the world—mandating and funding the programs of this unique resource for knowledge on a nonpartisan basis for 203 years. The Library of Congress under its 2004-2008 strategic plan will continue to build on its historic mission, “...to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.” We are faced with the greatest upheaval in the transmission of knowledge since the invention of the printing press: the electronic onslaught of digitized multimedia communication. This strategic plan will guide the Library as it superimposes a new, networked digital universe on top of its traditional artifactual (analog) collections.

[edit] World Digital Library

The World Digital Library is a visionary project with a goal of making available a significant fraction of the totality of human knowledge. Quoting from its Website:

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

Planning for this project began in 2005. The project will draw heavily from the national libraries of countries throughout the world. It includes the 190 nations that make up the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Each will digitally archive their own records and make them a part of the World Digital Library.

[edit] Related Topics

[edit] References

Foster, Andrea L. (5/21/08). Nonprofit Library Group Will Share Book Records With Google. Retrieved 6/18/08: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3021&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en. Quoting from the article:

In an effort to increase the visibility of libraries’ holdings on the Web, Google and OCLC—formerly known as the Online Computer Library Center—have agreed to swap data. Under the arrangement, OCLC member-libraries that have made their holdings available via Google Book Search will share their bibliographic records with Google. And Google Book Search, which contains the digitized text of more than one million books, will provide links to WorldCat, the world’s largest bibliographic database. It is run by OCLC, a nonprofit group that promotes technology in libraries.
Other groups, too, are trying to promote libraries holdings on the Web, including Open Library and LibraryThing.


Goth, Greg (2007). Digital Libraries Are Taking Form. IEEE Distributed Systems Online, vol. 8, no. 12, 2007, art. no. 0712-oz004. Retrieved 12/21/07: http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline/menuitem.9ed3d9924aeb0dcd82ccc6716bbe36ec/index.jsp?&pName=dso_level1&path=dsonline/2007/12&file=oz004news.xml&xsl=article.xsl&

Quoting from the article:

“All the published literature of humankind in the next generation will be in digital form,” says Brewster Kahle, cofounder of the Internet Archive and one of the driving forces behind the nonprofit Open Content Alliance (OCA, www.opencontentalliance.org), an open digitization consortium. “And all the older materials that will be used by younger people—except for a very few—will be online. So, if we want something to be used by the next generation, it has to be online. That’s an understood premise. It’s now also understood that it’s not that expensive to get there.”
…
“The technology for digitizing a book at beautiful quality is 10 cents a page,” he says. That cost covers optical-character-recognition digitization, compression, packaging in multiple downloadable formats, cataloguing, and hosting at redundant sites in North America and Europe for long-term digital preservation. It includes a PC interface that people can use to print from home. Alternatively, users can download, print, and bind through Amazon or similar book-binding vendor offerings.

Intute (1/16/08). UK Universities Institutional Repositories search project. Retrieved 1/23/08: http://www.intute.ac.uk/blog/2008/01/16/uk-universities-institutional-repositories-search-project/. Quoting from the article:

The Intute Institutional Repository Search of UK university research paper databases is to be launched in beta at the end of January. Content deposited in institutional repositories is growing, however as yet there is no comprehensive and easy way to search and retrieve this content. We believe that, in order to facilitate access to scholarly and educational material, this content should be widely accessible to the UK education community. In partnership with UKOLN http://www.ukoln.ac.uk at the University of Bath and SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk at the University of Nottingham, Intute has been commissioned by JISC www.jisc.ac.uk to develop a repository search infrastructure. This development aims to facilitate the discovery, access and retrieval of material. In doing so, we hope to raise the visibility of repository content and perpetuate the deposit of content.

[edit] Author or Authors

The initial version of this article was written by Dave Moursund.

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