Article: U.C. system signs on to Microsoft book-scan project

As the article says:

The University of California and the University of Toronto libraries have agreed to lend their collections of out-of-copyright material held in trust. In concert with the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft will scan and index the materials for use in its Windows Live Book Search, according to a Microsoft statement issued Friday.

Deciding who to align themselves with must be an interesting exercise for these libraries! Google? Microsoft? Or someone else? As the saying goes, whose horse do you put your cart behind? (Which project will succeed?)

As for explaining this effort, the article notes:

The idea behind digital libraries is that published information offers an alternative and accurate source of information from that gleaned via general Web searches. Digital libraries could also make a collective cultural archive globally accessible.

Very concise...

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Technorati tags: Google, Microsoft, Digitization