THIS IS GREAT NEWS:

Yahoo, The Internet Archive and several other organizations announced the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to make thousands of books, multimedia files and other materials freely searchable and accessible online.

Brewster Kahle, founder of The Internet Archive, said today's announcement is a "call for open participation in the Open Content Alliance." In other words, the group would love to see other organizations (libraries, publishers, archives, etc.) join the group.

As of today's launch, The Internet Archive, Yahoo, Adobe Systems, The European Archive, Hewlett Packard Labs, The National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media Inc, and the University of California are the founding members of the OCA.

Content that members of the Open Content Alliance will digitize a will eventually be accessible in several places including the OCA web site and via Yahoo. All of this goes towards Yahoo's goal to help users find, share, use and expand (FUSE) human knowledge both via a Yahoo search and elsewhere.

The OCA project differs from other digitization projects in that the database of scanned material will be available for anyone to use on any site. Yes, it's an open access database! You could even create a focused database (let's say one on American literature) and use it on your own web site.

Without getting into legal "what if's," most of the material in the OCA will be available as full text. There are no limits on how much you can view or download for offline viewing or printing. Kahle said that in some cases you can find content via the Open Content Alliance, print it, and slap a cover on it. Sort of a, "make your own book" type of thing.

The OCA is an opt-in program. An organization digitizing a work must have the permission from the copyright holder if the material is not in the public domain. "At the option of the copyright holder, copyrighted content may be distributed through a Creative Commons license," says the press release announcing the OCA.

"Creative Commons is a non-profit organization whose licensing encourages personal use, reuse and re-purposing of digital content. Content that is made available on the OCA website will be available in PDF and other widely adopted formats. This approach enables mass media and independent publishers to expand their reach by submitting content that spans categories, file formats and languages while retaining their copyrights."

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