More Book Search News

Walt Crawford gives an extensive overview in his Open Content Archive (OCA) and Google Book Search update. It is an excellent summary of other comments and discussions over the past several months. Of course, as soon as he publishes this, stating "The Internet Archive includes 35,000 books scanned as part of OCA (as of early December)," the OCA adds a whole new collection and announces passing the 100,000 volume mark.

In their .doc release, they describe the OCA collection:

The Internet Archive has made over 100,000 books available in little over a year since the announcement of the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) in October 2005. The collection brings together books from over a dozen libraries in Canada, the United States and India and was digitized at University of Toronto, University of California and various Indian libraries.

New collections and partners include

• Boston Public Library: The John Adams collection, Adams' complete personal library
• The Getty Research Institute: Major collection of books on art and architecture and an alternate collection on the performing arts.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The archive of publications issued by the Metropolitan Museum through the present.
• Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley: Key primary texts documenting the California Gold Rush and Western expansion.
• Johns Hopkins University Libraries: The James Birney Collection of Anti-Slavery materials.