2005: OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE
[Overview]
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was conceived by the Internet Archive in early 2005 to offer broad, public access to the world culture. It was launched in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit and governmental organizations willing to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The project aims at digitizing public domain books around the world and make them searchable through any web search engine and downloadable for free. Unlike the Google Print project, the OCA scans and digitizes only public domain books, except when the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the Text Archive of the Internet Archive. In December 2006, they reached a milestone of 100,000 digitalized books publicly available, with 12,000 new books added per month. Two years later, in December 2008, one million books were "posted under OCA principles or otherwise public domain hosted by the Internet Archive."