Digitization of Canada's heritage left to Google by Michael Geist, The Star (Sep 7)
Digitization of books in Canada hardly (if ever) receives any mention at all. Michael Geist notes that Library and Archives Canada was charged with looking after this, but has received little support from the federal government. Thus it looks like Canada will leave digitization of Canadian content to whatever Google finds through its partnerships.
Meantime, the European Union lauched Europeana as the fruit of its work on digitizing public domain materials with "more than 4.6 million digitized books, newspapers, film clips, maps, photographs and documents from across Europe."
"By comparison, Canada seems stuck at the digitization starting gate. Library and Archives Canada was given responsibility for the issue, but was unable to muster the necessary support for a comprehensive plan. The Department of Canadian Heritage, which would seem like a natural fit for a strategy designed to foster access to Canadian works, has funded a handful of small digitization efforts, but has shown little interest in crafting a vision similar to Europeana.
Digitization law and policies have also gone missing-in-action. The national copyright consultation wraps up next week, but the digitization issue has scarcely been raised. "
Geist doesn't mention that the University of Toronto Libraries have been working with the Internet Archives and Open Content Alliance for several years to digitize books - though these are not necessarily works by Canadians.
Posted by Gwen at September 8, 2009 07:12 PM