Came across a new organization today, The Open Content Alliance. I didn’t immediately realize that this was connected to the news stories I heard yesterday about Yahoo!’s entry into the digital collection building business. From the OCA website:
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 collections will be in the OCA archive initially?
The OCA will seed the archive with collections from the following organizations:
* European Archive
* Internet Archive
* National Archives (UK)
* O’Reilly Media
* Prelinger Archives
* University of California
* University of Toronto
You will be forgiven for thinking that this might somehow be a response to Google’s much publicized foray into digitizing library collections. Nice to see that open access is a guiding principle…