Good Terms - Improving Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships for Mass Digitization

A Report Prepared by Intelligent Television for RLG Programs, OCLC Programs and Research

By Peter Kaufman and Jeff Ubois

Executive Summary

In 2007, OCLC Programs and Research engaged Intelligent Television to study the partnership agreements between cultural institutions and for-profit companies for the mass digitization of books and other media. This report presents the findings of that study.

Libraries have been digitizing portions of their collections for more than twenty years, but recent opportunities to work with private partners, such as Google, Microsoft, and others, on mass digitization has opened up possibilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Private funding, commercially developed technology, and market-oriented sensibilities together may generate larger aggregations of digitized books far sooner than the library community had dreamed possible. There are many efforts underway to assess various aspects of these partnerships; this paper focuses on the terms in mass digitization agreements that affect research-community-centered outcomes.

Read the entire report on the D-Lib Magazine website