A FREE Digital Library

Well, this is pretty cool. Both Google and Yahoo are setting up just such a system, although Google's is stuck in legal limbo since they had some problems with copyright infringement. Yahoo is part of the Open Content Alliance, together with the non-profit Internet Archive, libraries from the universities of California and Toronto, Adobe and Hewlett-Packard.

The information to be digitised will include 18,000 works of American literature plus material from national and European archives, books, speeches, audio, video, and music.

The core of the Open Content Alliance library will be 18,000 classic works of American literature that include writing by Mark Twain, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe.

Currently Britain's National Archive and the European Archive are deciding what material to contribute to the project.

The end result will be a huge online collection freely available to web users. The first works to be digitised should be online by the end of the year and all 18,000 works should be available through the net by the close of 2006.

How great is that?! A free online library for anyone to access from the comfort of their homes. That's going to be a bonanza for anything from research for a term-paper to checking out an unknown musician, from searching for some trivial information to finding a good book to read.

I personally can't wait to check it out, and I'm also amazed by the speed at which the whole thing is being set up.

PS: I wouldn't want to be the one who has to scan all those books!!