National Public Radio has recently produced a story about libraries’ decisions to digitize their collections, whether through corporate sponsors like Google or non-profit organizations like the Internet Archive.
As a member of the Boston Library Consortium, the University of New Hampshire Library is participating in the Internet Archive’s Open Content Alliance (OCA) book digitization project by contributing public domain materials from its collection. Since scanning began in January, the Library has contributed more than 126,454 pages to the OCA Northeast Regional Scanning Center at the Boston Public Library.
For more information, see our Digital Collections.
As a member of the Boston Library Consortium, the University of New Hampshire Library is participating in the Internet Archive’s Open Content Alliance (OCA) book digitization project by contributing public domain materials from its collection.
Since scanning began in January, the Library has contributed more than 126,454 pages to the OCA Northeast Regional Scanning Center at the Boston Public Library. This represents 711 items with an average page count of 178 per item, including the Granite Monthly magazine, New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletins, the Manual for the General Court (the “red books”), and selected New Hampshire local history monographs.
For a brief description of the OCA project, selection criteria, and links to books we’ve already scanned, visit the Digital Collections page on the Library Website and select Open Content Alliance from the right side menu: http://www.library.unh.edu/diglib/.
The University of New Hampshire Library, though its membership in the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), will aid efforts to build a freely accessible library of digital materials. The BLC is partnering with the Open Content Alliance to build the digital library with materials from all its 19 member institutions. The BLC is the first large-scale consortium to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the Open Content Alliance.
The Consortium will offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials. Using Internet Archive technology, books from all 19 libraries will be scanned at a cost of just 10 cents per page. Collectively, the BLC member libraries, including the University of New Hampshire Library, provide access to over 34 million volumes. The BLC’s digitization efforts will be based in a new scanning center, the Northeast Regional Scanning Center, located at the Boston Public Library.
The BLC is an association of academic and research libraries located in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Founded in 1970, the Consortium supports resource sharing and enhancement of services to users through programs in cooperative collecting, access to electronic resources and physical collections, and enhanced interlibrary loan and document delivery.
Read the full press release at BLC.org.
