Internet Archive $1M grant
p2pnet.net News:- The non-profit Internet Archive, famous for its WayBack Machine collection of web pages, has received a $1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation so it can continue scanning public domain works for open online access.
"Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are pioneers in this exciting and historic opportunity to create a universal digital library that is both open-access and non-proprietary," ZDNet has Doron Weber, who overseas public understanding of science and technology at the Sloan Foundation, saying.
Kahle was one of the inventors of Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), a text-based search system that searched database indexes on remote servers before there were Internet search engines, says the story, going on:
"After WAIS was sold to AOL in 1995 for several million dollars, Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which works closely with the Open Content Alliance (OCA). The OCA developed a set of principles dedicated to a ‘permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content’ for free and open access."
In an earlier and different funding announcement, "The vision of an online universal library received tremendous impetus in December 2004 when the Google company announced its aim to develop a commercial realization of this concept, supported by a variety of fees," says the Sloan fundation, continuing:
Although several libraries, including Harvard and Stanford, agreed to contribute to the Google archive, there were concerns about relying on a sole system operated by a private for-profit entity.
The best-placed organization to unite the holders of content in a counterpart massive digitization effort built around the concept of open access is the Internet Archive. This grant enables the Archive to take steps to build the universal digital library, beginning with an archive of millions of books.
The project requires more than $200 million in funds by 2010, to be obtained from other foundations, libraries and other archival institutions around the world, and from private sources. The best technical advice suggests that today’s technology for scanning, data compression, storage, and distribution puts the goal within reach.
The main hurdles are funding, political will, cooperation from libraries, copyright restrictions, and the competing commercial effort.
The new grant will enable Internet Archive and the OCA to scan collections from several major institutions, including the entire collection of publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as several thousand images from the museum; John Adams’ personal library of over 3,800 works at the Boston Public Library; and other collections from The Getty Research Institute, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, says ZDNet.
"Google is so good at the media being their PR machine, that you would not know there was an alternative out there," it has Kahle saying.
"We have brand name institutions going open and foundations like the Sloan are funding (us). It shows that the Open Content Alliance is viable, that there is support for public interest. We don’t have to privatize the library system."
ZDNet points out that Google has, "begun to offer full-text, printable PDFs of public domain works with plans to add more as it scans more books," but, "its platform is closed, and its PDF pages have a ‘Digitized by Google’ watermark. The company is not planning to share its scanned material with the OCA or Internet Archive, according to Kahle.
"If the materials would be made available for broad public search and educational use we’d be all for it, but in my discussion with the founders (Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin) they aren’t going to," the story has Kahle saying.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
ZDNet – Grant funds open-source challenge to Google library, December 20, 2005
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