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October 23, 2007, 06:19 AM ET
On Corporations and Open Content
The New York Times profiled the fast-growing Open Content Alliance yesterday under the headline “Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on the Web.”
As Jessamyn West, of Librarian.net, writes, that characterization seems harsh. To be sure, libraries aligning themselves with the alliance—a book-scanning project created by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive—are implicitly rejecting similar efforts led by Google and Microsoft. But what’s at stake isn’t just whether books make it onto the Web. It’s how they get there. Many alliance members say that Google and Microsoft impose too many restrictions on the content they scan, and that Mr. Kahle’s project is a wide-open antidote.
Of course, some supporters of Mr. Kahle’s project have suggest more broadly that digitization projects shouldn’t be put in the hands of corporate giants at all. In that sense, the shunning of Google and Microsoft is important. The Open Content Alliance has corporate sponsors of its own, but it seems to be emerging as an alternative for librarians who aren’t comfortable with the role of corporations in distributing public-domain material. —Brock Read
Categories: Libraries, Company-Watch
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