The Open Content Alliance and Libraries Going Open!

August 27, 2008


I did not know to what topic, I should dedicate by 100th post. I wanted to post something that will be relevant for our colleagues in the Eastern Europe and Russian Federation. I think that the Open Content Alliance of Libraries represents an alternate way of disseminating information in an open access environment. It is not the negation of various access pricing models, but it should be evaluated as an alterante to other various pricing models that currently exist in our field of Information Studies.



As we know today, the Open Content Alliance named Maura Marx as First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance

Ms. Marx will move to the OCA from the Boston Public Library, where she most recently founded the Digital Library Program and was instrumental in evolving the Library’s philosophy toward Open Content principles.
Read the whole announcement.

Description:
The Open Content Alliance is an association of approximately 100 cultural
and academic institutions, working to engage in activities that support
the open sharing of information, including building joint online
collections. It was founded by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive in
2005 with 12 initial member institutions, and has grown to over 100 today.
The OCA and has collectively provided over 400,000 books for digitization
and contributed them to the Internet Archive?s shared public collections.
Information on member institutions and open content principles can be
found on the OCA web site at http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
.


The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and
other cultural artifacts in digital form. The Archive is a partner to many
large institutions, including the Library of Congress, National Archives
and Records Administration, NASA, Bibliotheque Nationale de France and UK
National Archives, as well as many state and local institutions. Some of
its well-known projects include OpenLibrary.org, nasaimages.org and the
many searchable collections at www.archive.org. The Archive operates 12
scanning centers around the United States and internationally, and
operates a data repository in San Francisco.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a New York-based non-profit philanthropy
founded in 1934, makes grants for research and education in science,
technology, economic performance and the quality of American life. In
addition to the Open Content Alliance and the Internet Archive, the
Foundation has supported the Library of Congress, PALINET, SOLINET, the
Boston Library Consortium, the New Orleans Public Library, the Espresso
Book Machine and Wikipedia, among others, as part of its program in
Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge. Information about the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation may be found on the Foundation?s web site at
http://www.sloan.org/