UC Libraries Partner With Technology Companies and Non-Profits to Provide Free Public Access to Digital Books

The University of California libraries are participating in a new partnership to build a freely accessible digital library with materials drawn from across the world.

The UC libraries will contribute books and resources in order to build a collection of out-of-copyright American literature.  With the support of Yahoo! Inc., UC library books will be digitized by the Internet Archive using a new technology that scans books at the cost of 10 cents per page.

The materials will be available from <http://opencontentalliance.org/>, the website of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a global consortium that will build and openly distribute a comprehensive set of digitized print and multimedia content.

The OCA’s founding contributors also include the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives (UK), O’Reilly Media, Inc., Adobe, and Hewlett Packard Labs.