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Initiated by several graduate
students from the University of
Michigan, the Internet Public
Library (IPL) was created on
Mar. 17, 1995. Ideas began when
they sought to find a solution to
a lack of accessibility between
libraries and conducted experiments
by designing and building
the so-called IPL.
There are several organizations
and companies that do the
same thing, just in a different
way and with different policies.
The Open Content Alliance
(OCA) collaborated with various
organizations like European
Archive, Internet Archive, National
Archives (UK), O’Reilly
Media, University of California
and University of Toronto to
build a permanent archive of
multilingual, digitized text and
multimedia content. Recently,
Microsoft joined the OCA.
The Google Books Library
project is another big name that
has content available to the public.
When you conduct a Google
search for a book from the Library
Project, you’ll see bibliographic
information about it.
If the book is out of copyright,
you’ll be able to read the entire
book online; otherwise you’ll
see links directing you to online
bookstores and libraries.
According to the New York
Times, many prominent libraries
are participating in Google’s
project including New York
Public Library and libraries
at the University of Michigan,
Harvard University and Stanford
University.
However the Google Books
Library Project enforces some
restrictions, which doesn’t allow
other commercial search
engines to obtain access to
scanned materials.
On the other hand, the University
of California, which
is participating the OCA and
Yahoo!’s project, recently decided
to join the Google Books
Library Project too.
We don’t know how the online
books will end up yet, but one
thing is clear:
There will be more resources
available to read online in the
future.
For more information on digital
books, visit the following links:
IPL
www.ipl.org/
OCA
www.opencontentalliance.org/
Open Library
www.openlibrary.org/
Google Books
books.google.com/
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