The Open Content Alliance at age one

A Year Later, OCA Members Gather in San Francisco To Take Stock, Library Journal Academic Newswire, October 27, 2006. Excerpt:

It's all "catching on," says Internet Archive founder and Open Content Alliance pioneer Brewster Kahle. Last week, on October 20, the first anniversary of the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), 100 delegates from 40 organizations, including the Internet Archive, the University of California, Berkeley, the British Library and the Smithsonian, gathered in San Francisco to assess the efforts of the alliance to date. And if the OCA has failed to make as many headlines as its corporate competitors, it is nevertheless making steady progress with its scanning efforts. Kahle told the LJ Academic Newswire that, one year into the project, the OCA has moved from its "big picture" beginnings to the more nuts and bolt issues....

As the project progresses, member meetings could soon become quarterly events, he said.

After its first year, OCA has now scanned and cataloged over 30,000 books, available on its site. Today, OCA scans about 500 books a day and expects output to increase tenfold by the end of 2007. OCA partners include Yahoo!, the University of California, the British Library, Smithsonian Institution, University of Illinois, Boston Library Consortium, European Archive, O'Reilly Media, Research Library Group, as well as many other academic, technological, non-profit, and government organizations. Perhaps most importantly, Kahle said the OCA discussions honed in on the "open" in the Open Content Alliance. For OCA, the effort is more than a race to scan library book content for a commercial index, but extends to the use of that content. With OCA, "public domain means public domain," Kahle noted. "That was one of the 'aha' moments, that open as we know it may not be open enough and that the digitized public domain must be public domain. Libraries understand this; so does Yahoo." That means, Kahle says, once public domain books are scanned, there are "no restrictions at all on users, and anyone can build any service on top of it." In contrast, he noted, restrictions in some of Google's library partner contracts appear to limit how some library copies of public domain books scanned in Google Book Search can be used by parties outside the library.