The world of accessible, open and collaborative digital knowledge continues to expand. Recent news includes:
$2 Million Sloan Foundation Grant To Help Digitize Thousands of Books
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2007/07-020.html
The Library of Congress will use this grant to digitize thousands of public-domain works, "with a major focus on at-risk "brittle books" and U.S. history volumes."
Princeton Library joins Google project to make books available online
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/84/71S02/index.xml?section=topstories
Over the next six years, approximately 1 million books in Princeton's collection will be made available online in a searchable format through Google's book-scanning project. Princeton is the 12th institution to participate in Google’s digitization campaign.
$25-million grant to create Canadian online research databases
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2007/02/09/research-grants.html
The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), has received a $25-million federal grant to build new databases for material in the social sciences and humanities. The CRKN buys licensing rights for the material to make it available to more than 800,000 researchers and graduate students in Canada.
ScientificCommons
http://en.scientificcommons.org/
This “single port of call” was recently launched for accessing freely available scientific information that is published using open access models.
Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence (NoE)
http://www.noe-kaleidoscope.org/pub/
This is the "world's first Open Archive for technology-enhanced learning." It will collect research results from across Europe in such diverse and converging disciplines as computer, social and education sciences
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page
"This Wiki is an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment based on Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike license."
For other links to similar kinds of resources, read my previous blog entries:
Wikis, peer review, and free books
