Hopkins has joined with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) in an effort to make the Milton S. Eisenhower Library digital, including one of its special collections.
The special collection contains anti-slavery pamphlets and publications that ran from the late 19th century through the Reconstruction period, which had been compiled by a leader of the abolitionist movement, James Birney. These materials have a lot of research value.
The Open Content Alliance is a cumulative and international group that is comprised of a range of organizations, including cultural, technological and governmental. Together, these groups are working to digitize a multilingual archive of text and multimedia content.
According to a representative at OCA, several universities, such as Columbia, Harvard and Hopkins, have become interested in implementing students' access to out of print and rare texts and to enrich their scope of world culture.
The OCA archive will be available through its Web site, where Yahoo! has collaboratively indexed and stored all of the content for the ease of Internet users.
The Birney Collection is a prototype, since the OCA hasn't really begun to incorporate special collections.
"Our aim with digitizing the material is to increase student and faculty access to these primary sources," said Margaret Burri, curator of manuscripts of special collections and curator of and a librarian for history.
If digitalization is implemented, students and staff would have access to all the collections of the OCA's archive on the Internet, while respecting the rights of content owners and contributors by using PDF software. OCA is designed to increase the circulation and knowledge of texts and information in general.
University of California recently contributed its archive on American literature, which is now available for downloading and reuse for any member of OCA. The benefits of pooling texts between universities can only increase student knowledge and awareness, making the OCA a valuable resource.
In the future, Hopkins's special collections has some trade union pamphlets that it would like to digitize, if there still remains time with the scanning technology needed to digitize, Hopkins has more special collections that Burri would like to see put up.
"Getting anything in digital is beneficial to students and the collection we have is certainly appealing to students and researchers beyond the University," Burri said.
Another widely used option is the Google Book Search. Acting like a card catalogue, Google Book Search gives users information about a text, including a couple of sentences from the text.
With the Google Books Library Project, books out of copyright are available online and are available to users to view and download, as well as links to where the user can buy or borrow the book. Possessing a digitized library would impact the lives of Hopkins students and staff in numerous ways.
"As a Hopkins student, it just seems practical to implement the digital library system. Whether OCA or Google is more beneficial is not for students to decide, but if the technology of digitizing libraries is out there, I can't think of any reason why Hopkins should not partake," freshman Claire Cravero said.
Another freshman, Jonathan Jacobs said, "Digital library technology is important and has the potential to exponentially increase student productivity and availability to diverse resources. What Hopkins must pay attention to is the trends with other universities and what they seem to be leaning towards."
However, several major research libraries have declined offers from OCA and Google to scan their library books. Their complaints are that they do agree with the restrictions put on new digital collections and feel that companies want unnecessary rights over library texts.
"In terms of digitizing texts, I can understand the anti-corporate view, but I am not aware of the specifics. I think anything that increases people's access to primary sources is great," Burri said.
Google pays to scan the books and does not profit from Web pages, while OCA charges $30 to scan each book. The money is given to the group's members. This reason is most likely why many research libraries, such as the New York Public Library, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan, have accepted Google's offer over OCA's offer.
As for Hopkins's participation in the program, "It's going beautifully. They are handling the materials very well, and that makes us comfortable because it is a special collection. Having more people discover our resources is great and OCA is doing a very nice job with collection; it is already heavily used by faculty and students," Burri said.
