Dan Scott wrote:
>
> Had a thought about this recently. Based on purely unscientific
> observation, the available collection of Amazon's cover images tend
> towards the recently available and commercially popular books (for
> obvious reasons). While daydreaming about the possibility of
> converting our legacy holdings to digital format, I wondered whether
> the contracts that those libraries that had already signed with
> Google, Microsoft, et al to digitize their collections would prevent
> them from contributing the cover images for their collections to an
> open collection of cover images.
Great idea. I looked at Google books and it appears that the cover
images that are available are all, or almost all, from the current
books. Then I used my brain a bit and realized that most university
libraries do not retain dust covers, so for hardbacks they lose the
cover art anyway. There are covers from trade paperbacks, but those tend
to be recent and academic libraries generally don't acquire those if the
hardcover is available.
It seems that cover art for older books will be rare. And cover art from
university collections will be rare, too. However, for those books, an
image of the title page might be a good second choice. Especially for
the really old books, when the title pages were fairly ornate.
Meanwhile, to Dan's question about licenses, I am pretty sure that the
Google license would prevent the libraries from sharing anything of this
nature with the public. The OCA project would allow it. I don't know
about the kinds of licenses people have with Microsoft.
kc
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------
Received on Mon Mar 26 2007 - 09:26:03 EDT