New York Timestan bir makale. Arastirma Kutuphaneleri Google ve
Microsoft'un kitaplari sayısallastirma onerilerini reddedip, Open
Content Alliance'le isbirligine yonelmesi konsund auzunca bir makale.

Ilgınızı ceker diye dusundum.
saygilar
Mustafa Akgul
-------

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

October 22, 2007

  Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web

By KATIE HAFNER
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/katie_hafner/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and Microsoft
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/microsoft_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by
restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area,
are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit
effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms,
which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search
services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it
converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is
making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the
resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more
useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned
again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a
cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious
financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started
in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the
New York Public Library
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_public_library/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and libraries at the University of Michigan
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_michigan/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
Harvard
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those
collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library
and the Smithsonian Institution
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/smithsonian_institution/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on
pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is
free of business interests or restrictions.

Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to
hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some
libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to
dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that
dominance for commercial gain.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid, an
adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of
California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other
by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”

Last month, the Boston Library Consortium of 19 research and academic
libraries in New England that includes the University of Connecticut
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_connecticut/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and the University of Massachusetts
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_massachusetts/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
said it would work with the Open Content Alliance to begin digitizing
the books among the libraries’ 34 million volumes whose copyright had
expired.

“We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want
to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from
it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library,
which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal
library of John Adams.

Mr. Margolis said his library had spoken with both Google and Microsoft,
and had not shut the door entirely on the idea of working with them. And
several libraries are working with both Google and the Open Content
Alliance.

Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted
that the company’s deals with libraries were not exclusive. “We’re
excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign
many more,” Mr. Smith said.

“The powerful motivation is that we’re bringing more offline information
online,” he said. “As a commercial company, we have the resources to do
this, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits users, publishers,
authors and libraries. And it benefits us because we provide an improved
user experience, which then means users will come back to Google.”

The Library of Congress
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/library_of_congress/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
has a pilot program with Google to digitize some books. But in January,
it announced a project with a more inclusive approach. With $2 million
from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the library’s first mass
digitization effort will make 136,000 books accessible to any search
engine through the Open Content Alliance. The library declined to
comment on its future digitization plans.

The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the
founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996
with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The
group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions,
including the Smithsonian Institution.

Although Google is making public-domain books readily available to
individuals who wish to download them, Mr. Kahle and others worry about
the possible implications of having one company store and distribute so
much public-domain content.

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one
corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have
handed too much control to a private entity,” Mr. Kahle said.

The Open Content Alliance, he said, “is fundamentally different, coming
from a community project to build joint collections that can be used by
everyone in different ways.”

Mr. Kahle’s group focuses on out-of-copyright books, mostly those
published in 1922 or earlier. Google scans copyrighted works as well,
but it does not allow users to read the full text of those books online,
and it allows publishers to opt out of the program.

Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005, as did
Yahoo
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/yahoo_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
which also has a book search project. Google also spoke with Mr. Kahle
about joining the group, but they did not reach an agreement.

A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a
book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines
other than Microsoft’s.

“Unlike Google, there are no restrictions on the distribution of these
copies for academic purposes across institutions,” said Jay Girotto,
group program manager for Live Book Search from Microsoft. Institutions
working with Microsoft, he said, include the University of California
and the New York Public Library.

Some in the research field view the issue as a matter of principle.

Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has made
several grants to libraries for digital conversion of books, said that
several institutions approached by Google have spoken to his
organization about their reservations. “Many are hedging their bets,” he
said, “taking Google money for now while realizing this is, at best, a
short-term bridge to a truly open universal library of the future.”

The University of Michigan, a Google partner since 2004, does not seem
to share this view. “We have not felt particularly restricted by our
agreement with Google,” said Jack Bernard, a lawyer at the university.

The University of California, which started scanning books with the Open
Content Alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo in 2005, has added Google. Robin
Chandler, director of data acquisitions at the University of
California’s digital library project, said working with everyone helps
increase the volume of the scanning.

Some have found Google to be inflexible in its terms. Tom Garnett,
director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent
natural history and botanical libraries that have agreed to digitize
their collections, said he had had discussions with various people at
both Google and Microsoft.

“Google had a very restrictive agreement, and in all our discussions
they were unwilling to yield,” he said. Among the terms was a
requirement that libraries put their own technology in place to block
commercial search services other than Google, he said.

Libraries that sign with the Open Content Alliance are obligated to pay
the cost of scanning the books. Several have received grants from
organizations like the Sloan Foundation.

The Boston Library Consortium’s project is self-funded, with $845,000
for the next two years. The consortium pays 10 cents a page to the
Internet Archive, which has installed 10 scanners at the Boston Public
Library. Other members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and Brown University
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/brown_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.

The scans are stored at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and are
available through its Web site. Search companies including Google are
free to point users to the material.

On Wednesday the Internet Archive announced, together with the Boston
Public Library and the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that it would start scanning
out-of-print but in-copyright works to be distributed through a digital
interlibrary loan system.

  <http://www.nytimes.com/>
Copyright 2007
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New
York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

---
Her hangi bir nedenle acik-duyuru listesinden cikmak istiyorsaniz,
acik-duyuru-unsubcribe_at_acik-kaynak.org.tr adresine  bos/dolu bir mesaj atiniz.
Bir insanla yazismak gerekirse acik-duyuru-admins_at_acik-kaynak.org.tr adresine atiniz.