• http://www.opencontentalliance.org/

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

The OCA is a trademark of the Internet Archive, where material digitized by the OCA is principally accessible. In addition, Yahoo! will index all content stored by the OCA to make it available to the broadest set of Internet users. The OCA supports efforts by others to create and offer tools such as finding aids, catalogs, and indexes that will enhance the usability of the materials in the archive and has recently announced an important related project, Open Library, to gather and link to texts and cataloging data on all books ever published. There are no restrictions on public domain books scanned by OCA members; users are not forced to use proprietary interfaces; and OCA scans are not hidden from rival search engines.

OCA has regional scanning centers in several locations (San Francisco, Los Angeles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Toronto, Austin, New York, Washington DC, London) scanning up to 12,000 books a month--over four million pages. For 10¢ a page, we can now bring public domain books and other materials online. Audio recordings cost roughly $10 a disc, and videos about $15 per hour.

We are currently focusing on public domain works, many contributed as collections from libraries. Up until recently, the OCA has only digitized works in copyright with the permission of publishers. But in October 2007 a group within the OCA announced that it will be scanning in-copyright but out-of-print books and make them available through digital interlibrary loan. For other in-copyright materials, Creative Commons licenses are starting to make more sense where noncommercial uses (research and educational use, for example) are allowed. However, if you're going to make commercial reuse, you get permission. We're working on a number of business models that will make this work and welcome commercial publishers as partners in this enterprise. We would like to see many publishers, many distribution methods, and many different user communities all thriving in this new digital era.

Brewster Kahle
Digital Librarian, Director and Co-Founder, The Internet Archive