UC Will Put Vast Collection of American Literature Online

UC has inked a deal to join a partnership of universities, technology companies and other organizations in the creation of an online, multimedia resource archive, offering the university's prized American literature collection.

UC libraries will build a collection of thousands of out-of-copyright works, including work by Mark Twain and Jack London, to contribute to the effort.

The collection will cover works written from the 1800s until the 1920s and will be composed entirely of books within the UC libraries.

With the digital support of Yahoo Inc., which will provide its search technology to the project, the materials are scheduled to be made available beginning in the spring of 2006 on the Open Content Alliance Web site, the global consortium building the archive.

"This program will allow UC Berkeley students and researchers to access material at the click of a mouse without having to search the stacks of Doe and Moffitt," said UC spokesperson Jennifer Ward. "It will also be a great convenience to the public, including high school students, who will have access to literature at the universities without having to find transportation to campus."

The literature will be available for download free of charge, opening the door to convenient public access to the historical documents.

"It is part of the mission of UC libraries to make knowledge available to the people of California and to the world at large," said Daniel Greenstein, university librarian and director of UC's California Digital Library, a digital library of resources including scholarly texts, images and manuscripts. "The inclusive approach of this program emphasizes open access to libraries at the University of California."

Since UC Berkeley has the largest library system within UC, Greenstein expects it to make one of the largest contributions to this initiative.

The Open Content Alliance's founding contributors also include the University of Toronto, the European Archival Network, Adobe Systems, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Labs.

Search engine giant Google undertook a similar task of digitizing library holdings this past year, teaming up with five research libraries nationwide.

Ultimately, digitizing collections is the next step toward fulfilling the mission of archiving and providing access to information, and does not detract from the original print editions of materials, Greenstein said.

"Creating online resources is another role that libraries will take on. The Berkeley libraries are more than just a place to access information-they house many cultural artifacts whose value does not diminish by creating online sources of information," Greenstein said. "Online publishing is just another way Berkeley can serve the university and the public."

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