You may have heard about Google's initiative to scan lots of university book collections and make them available through the Google Books service. Less well-known is an initiative by the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to also scan books, but to make them available to any search engine. The Triangle Research Libraries Network recently announced that they -- that is to say the libraries at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and UNC -- will be joining the OCA initiative and making public domain books from university libraries available online.

What is the OCA? Okay, let's start with the Internet Archive. Available at http://www.archive.org/index.php, the Internet Archive contains, in addition to an archive of old Web pages, a massive amount of freely available content -- over 47,000 live concerts! Over 114,000 movies! Over 230,000 audio recordings! And over 350,000 texts.

The Open Content Alliance, which is administered by the aforementioned Internet Archive, is an alliance of over 80 institutions and libraries which have come together to build a huge collection of public domain digitized text and multimedia and make it available on Archive.org. And that's where the Triangle Research Libraries Network comes in.

In the first year of the initiative, UNC-Chapel Hill and NCSU will each digitize 2,700 public domain books and put them online. Each school will focus on the historical strengths of its collection -- sciences and engineering at NCSU, social sciences and humanities at UNC-CH. Duke will also be contributing some content this first year as well.

You can actually see the first fifteen books that have been uploaded by NCSU at http://www.archive.org/details/ncsulibraries/ . Of course, this is the very beginning of the project and there hasn't been a lot of traffic as yet, but it looks to me like The potato; a compilation of information from every available source is so far the breakout hit of the collection. Other books available at the moment include "The nursery-book; a complete guide to the multiplication of plants", "Familiar trees and their leaves", and "The western world. Picturesque sketches of nature and natural history in North and South America".

I am so proud of the TRLN for joining the Open Content Alliance. What a great way to share the universities' wealth with the rest of the world -- and to make exclusive library content available across its own network as well! I can't wait to see what's added to Archive.org.