The Race to Create a Digital Library: Google Books vs. the Open Content Alliance

Abstract

In recent years, a number of organizations have begun the task of digitizing great numbers of books and making them accessible via the Internet. The two largest and best publicized initiatives are the Google Books and Open Content Alliance (OCA) projects. While they both aim to make large numbers of books accessible to users online, the two initiatives have several important differences, such as the motives of the parties involved, the transparency of the digitization process, and the way in which copyright issues are handled. This paper provides readers with an overview of the history and current issues surrounding these two consortia projects, and proposes some potential implications that they might have on libraries and their users.