Yahoo challenges Google book project

Yahoo is launching a direct rival to the Google Print book and library search service. As a founding member of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) co-operative, Yahoo will make the public domain collections of the UK National Archives, the Internet Archive, University of California and University of Toronto searchable online.

Yahoo will fund the digitisation of a body of American literature selected by the University of California, which will be free to access and read in PDF format. Unlike Google, Yahoo and OCA has clearly stated that only public domain material will be digitised or permission must be secured from copyright holders. The Internet Archive will host the digitised materials and Yahoo will index the entire archive.

Adobe and Hewlett-Packard are technology partners in OCA alongside Yahoo, whilst the European Archive, O’Reilly Media technology publishers, and Prelinger Archives of stock pictures, join the National Archives and university members. James Strachan, National Archives head of online marketing, said: “This project supports our aims of maximising access to our holdings.”

The National Archives will be releasing contents from its movie archive onto the OCA archive, including a collection of historic public information films. “They open up a new vision of the public archive. Researchers are increasingly using video material,” said Strachan.

He added that the National Archives was talking to a number of online digitisation programmes and would not rule out joining others. “The value of this project is that research is easier on the internet with search engines and people can access the rich depths of material we have.”

The Google Print book and library digitisation scheme has been beset with copyright problems .