brainwagon

Boing Boing links to this CNN story about the Open Content Alliance: a group which is trying to scan and make available books of considerable historic and cultural value on the Internet. They are receiving a one million dollar grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize collections at the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute and the Metropolitan museum of art.

The deal represents a coup for Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, a strident critic of the controls that Google has imposed on its book-scanning initiative.

“They don’t want the books to appear in anyone else’s search engine but their own, which is a little peculiar for a company that says its mission is to make information universally accessible,” Kahle said.

Cool.

[tags]Open Content Alliance,Public Domain,Google Books,Alfred P. Sloan Foundation[/tags]