Microsoft, Joining Growing Digital-Library Effort, Will Pay for Scanning of 150,000 Books

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

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Microsoft, joining growing digital-library effort, will pay for scanning of 150,000 books

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With a $5-million commitment, Microsoft's MSN Search division is joining universities and its online-search rival Yahoo in a consortium dedicated to scanning millions of public-domain books. The company's pledge will pay for the scanning of 150,000 volumes.

The consortium, called the Open Content Alliance, was announced three weeks ago (The Chronicle, October 3). Since then, 14 more universities have also joined, promising to contribute money, books, or services to the project. The original members of the alliance include the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies.

The consortium's approach stands in stark contrast to that of Google's Library Project, which is scanning both books in the public domain and books still covered by copyright. Google says its search results will include only snippets of text for copyright-protected volumes, as well as links to book-selling sites. Nevertheless, five publishers have sued the company, claiming copyright infringement (The Chronicle, October 20).

The latest institutions to join the Open Content Alliance are Columbia University, Emory University, the Johns Hopkins University libraries, the Prelinger Archives, Research Libraries Group, Rice University, the Smithsonian Institution libraries, the Universities of Pittsburgh and Virginia, and five Canadian institutions: McMaster University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, York University, and the Universities of British Columbia and Ottawa.

Danielle Tiedt, a general manager at MSN, said the company believed it was a good idea to join with rivals in the alliance to scan books, so that books would not be scanned repeatedly by competing companies and so that Microsoft could focus its energies on improving its search technology. The company also announced that it would create a new service, called MSN Book Search, that is scheduled to begin next year.

Ms. Tiedt said that Microsoft planned to focus on adding book collections that would provide answers to Internet search requests that current online sources cannot provide. The company estimates that more than 50 percent of online queries go unanswered using today's search engines.

"The Web doesn't have all the answers," said Ms. Tiedt. "Given that the Web only has about 10 years of information, it's not surprising that it doesn't have all the answers to people's questions."

The company has not yet decided which books it will scan, Ms. Tiedt said, adding that the books might belong to institutions that are not members of the alliance. "We're committed to 150,000, but we're completely free to choose where those books come from," she said. "We're not constricted to just working with people within the Open Content Alliance."

That rival companies are joining the alliance is evidence that the project is "fundamentally a mechanism of sharing," said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that is coordinating the book scanning for the alliance.

"An open library allows lots of people to participate," he added.

• 5 Big Publishing Houses Sue Google to Prevent Scanning of Copyrighted Works (10/20/2005)

• Yahoo Works With 2 Academic Libraries and Other Archives on Project to Digitize Collections (10/3/2005)

• Authors' Group Sues Google Over Book-Scanning Project at 5 Research Libraries (9/22/2005)

• From Gutenberg to Google: Five Views on the Search-Engine Company's Project to Digitize Library Books (6/3/2005)

• Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Leading Research Libraries (12/14/2004)