December 2006 > Live Search Books, the digital library of Microsoft
The beta version of Live Search Books was released in December 2006, with a search possible by keyword for non-copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft in partner libraries. The British Library and the libraries of the Universities of California and Toronto were the first ones to join in, followed in January 2007 by the New York Public Library and the Cornell University Library. Books offered full text views and could be downloaded in PDF files. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements with several publishers, including Cambridge University Press and McGraw Hill, for their books to be available in Live Search Books. After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft ended the Live Search Books program in May 2008. These books are available in the OCA collections of the Internet Archive.
December 2006 > A quote by Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer
Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer, wrote in December 2006: "I imagine the ebook of the future as a kind of wiki crystallized and packaged in a format. How valuable will it be? Its value will be the value of a book: the unity and quality of editorial work!" (NEF Interview)
December 2006 > A quote by Pierre Schweitzer, inventor of the @folio project
Peter Schweitzer, inventor of the @folio project, a reading device project, wrote in December 2006: "The luck we all have is to live here and now this fantastic change. When I was born in 1963, computers didn't have much memory. Today, my music player could hold billions of pages, a true local library. Tomorrow, by the combined effects of the Moore Law and the ubiquity of networks, we will have instant access to works and knowledge. We won't be much interested any more on which device to store information. We will be interested in handy functions and beautiful objects." (NEF Interview)
March 2007 > Citizendium, a collaborative free online encyclopedia
Citizendium — which stands for "The Citizen's Compendium" - was launched in March 2007 as a pilot project to build a new encyclopedia, at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in January 2001, but resigned later on over policy and content quality issues, as well as the use of anonymous pseudonyms. Citizendium is a wiki project open to public collaboration, but combining "public participation with gentle expert guidance". The project is experts-led, not experts-only. Contributors use their own names, and they are guided by expert editors. There are also constables who make sure the rules are respected. There were 1,100 high-quality articles, 820 authors, and 180 editors in March 2007, 11,800 articles in August 2009, and 15,000 articles in September 2010. Citizendium also wants to act as a prototype for upcoming large scale knowledge-building projects that would deliver reliable reference, scholarly and educational content.
May 2007 > The Encyclopedia of Life, to document all species of animals and plants
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) was launched in May 2007 as a global scientific effort to document all known species of animals and plants (1.8 million), including endangered species, and expedite the millions of species yet to be discovered and cataloged (about 8 million). The encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University who, in an essay dated 2002, was the first to express the wish for such an encyclopedia. The multimedia encyclopedia has gathered texts, photos, maps, sound, and videos, with a webpage for each species, to provide a single portal for millions of documents scattered online and offline. The first pages were available in mid- 2008. The encyclopedia should be completed with all known species in 2017. The English version will be translated in several languages by partner organizations.