Major Canadian book-scanning project

Canadian libraries join race to digitize books, CBC, December 29, 2005. An unsigned news story. (Thanks to LIS News.) Excerpt:

A major effort to digitize millions of books and other documents at libraries is beginning across Canada. Canadian research libraries have formed a digitization alliance called Alouette Canada to get their books online. The process involves scanning the millions of books available in Canadian libraries so they can be read by internet users. Parts of the virtual library should be available beginning next year — and it'll be free to use. Tim Mark, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, says Alouette is taking on a large project that will extend over several years. "The initial estimate is three to four million titles so the scope is huge," he says. "I think it's fair to say that librarians and research libraries in particular have seen the vision and the possibility and the potential for universal access to all knowledge." University of Toronto chief librarian Carol Moore will head a group of 27 major Canadian academic research libraries that have joined the Alouette Canada project....Alouette will step up the digitizing process. Even rare documents will be available. Among them are fragile works from the 16th century, Banting and Best's papers about their discovery of insulin and, from Memorial University, important documents related to the history of Newfoundland. The Canadian group is working with a big international effort to digitize books, the Open Content Alliance, based in San Francisco. Canada's libraries will be co-operating with international libraries, such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the British Library, which already have large digitized collections....Publishers and authors groups fear that books still under copyright protection will be put online. In Canada, the focus is on works in the public domain, so the copyright controversy is not an issue.