For Yahoo! it all started with OCA and The Digital Archive of Global Content for Universal Access ...sounds like a massive undertaking. Thank goodness it’s a collaborative effort - Yahoo! seems to understand the meaning of ‘collaboration’ – with HP, Adobe, O’Reilly Media, the Internet Archive, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Toronto.
“The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content…”
Building a Digital Library is something Google has had problems completing (because of copyright issues), but Yahoo! VP of Search Content, David Mandelbrot says "My feeling is we are doing something new here," Mandelbrot said. "We are building a collaborative effort that will make a great deal of copyrighted material available in a way that's acceptable to the creators. That is novel."
“The alliance won't include any copyrighted material unless it receives the explicit permission of a publisher or author.
While Google's Digital Library project was halted recently due to its “opt out” provision. "It has outraged many publishers, who contend the company is flouting long-established copyright laws."
So the big difference between Google and Yahoo's Digital Library project is 'ask first' vs 'opt out'. Obviously publishers see a difference.
If and when a Digital Library becomes available this will have an enormous impact on World Literacy. It will be a source of free information and a new means of knowledge acquisition available to all.
Watching Yahoo! and Google right now is like watching the “War of the Titans”... wonder what will happen next? Stay tuned...
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Tags: yahoo digital+library google education open+source education+technology
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