Microsoft will fund Open Content Alliance to digitize 150,000 public domain books over the next year. Yahoo agreed to power the OCA earlier this month.


Microsoft will fund the digital duplication of 150,000 old books over the next year. Microsoft’s MSN will first digitize and make available the public domain books. It is working with the Internet Archive to digitize the material. MSN will extend it to other types of offline content later.

Open Content Alliance, OCA, has signed up a dozen major libraries in North America, Britain and Europe. Yahoo agreed to power the OCA earlier this month for digitizing library books.

Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft Corp., said, “With MSN Book Search, we are excited to be working with libraries worldwide to digitize and index information from the world’s printed materials, taking another step in our efforts to better answer people’s questions with trusted content from the best sources”. [source]

Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet archive, working with OCA, said, “The goal of the OCA archive is to digitize and make available globally sourced digital collections, including multimedia content, representing the creative output of humankind.

We are proud that MSN is working with the OCA in the shared vision of creating a better, more relevant search experience for people around the world”. [source]

Other participants for OCA include: Adobe Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., the Internet Archive, O’Reilly Media Inc., the University of California and the University of Toronto.

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