Media contact: Anna Dahlstein, tel. (919) 515-3585

Members of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have announced that they are joining the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and other major research libraries in contributing to the freely accessible digital library hosted by the OCA. TRLN is a collaborative organization of the research libraries at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

By partnering with the OCA, the TRLN libraries are ensuring that their online collections will remain open to scholars and all other members of the global community. Administered by the non-profit Internet Archive, the OCA represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that are helping to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

In the first year, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University will each convert public domain books into high-resolution, downloadable, reusable digital files that will be available on the Internet Archive website, can be linked to from local online catalogs, and can be indexed locally and by any web search engine. UNC and NCSU will start by each hosting one state-of-the-art Scribe machine provided by the Internet Archive to scan the books. Each university library will focus on historic collection strengths, such as plant and animal sciences, engineering and physical science at NCSU and rare books, North Caroliniana, and other special collections at UNC. Duke University will also contribute select content for digitization during the first year of the collaborative project.

To view content contributed by the NCSU Libraries, visit this Internet Archive page.

Through their memberships in the OCA, the UNC and NCSU libraries envision opportunities to build on long-standing TRLN cooperative arrangements. Because 70% of the titles held within TRLN libraries are unique to a single member institution, coordinated digitization efforts will offer an opportunity to expand access to and use of the extensive research collections held within TRLN. TRLN and its members also intend to work toward the development of shared principles for digitization and the long-term preservation of digitized content.

The OCA comprises more than 80 other major institutions and research libraries, including the British Library, University of Toronto, Smithsonian Institution, Getty Research Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Virginia, and University of California system.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1996 to build a permanent and freely accessible digital library of web sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Built on open source software, it is the largest publicly available web archive in existence.