As one of the 19 members of the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), the Tisch Library will begin to archive digital material, according to Library Director Jo-Ann Michalak.
The project involves collaboration with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group of organizations from around the world that aim to build a "permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content," according to its Web site.
Everyone in the BLC will have "barrier-free" digital access to all public domain material, according to its Executive Director Barbara Preece.
The project was first presented at a Coalition for Networked Information event where Internet entrepreneur and OCA supporter Brewster Kahle gave a presentation on digitizing such material through the BLC.
According to Preece, the presentation was well received. "We endorsed the principles of the Open Content Alliance, and we spent the last year fundraising," she said.
This funding has come primarily from the 19 individual library institutions. While financial considerations were a concern at Tufts, Michalak said that the library eventually decided to take advantage of the opportunity and is currently using money from a third-party endowment.
Additionally, funds may increase as a result of the ability to include donor acknowledgements on the file server. "I see it as an opportunity for donors who would like to have their name recognized," Michalak said.
Currently, the library plans to digitize three collections over the next two years.
The first collection is the complete run of the Revue du Monde. This collection has never been digitized before and is widely used in the French Department.
The second collection is the Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, but this is problematic because "some of it is in copyright and some of it isn't," Michalak said.
The BLC is only digitizing material out of copyright, but she said that it is likely that Tisch will be given permission by the journal to proceed.
The third collection Tufts will include is a special equestrian one that was recently donated to the Tufts Webster Veterinary Library.
If things go well, Tufts will become a partner in Kahle's goal: bringing "public access to all the published works of humankind."
In total, the OCA scans content at one million pages per month.
"The idea of the big mission is ... to build the Library of Alexandria, Version Two," Kahle said.
This will be an ongoing project. "We are starting small," Preece said.
While a number of libraries have worked to digitize their material through the OCA, the BLC is the first large consortium to work with it on the project. The OCA, however, is considering expanding to other consortiums.
