(15 April 2015) The Internet Archive and the Chinese Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL), are pleased to announce that 500,000 English-language, academic books will be digitized through a partnership that leverages strengths from both organizations. This furthers an initiative begun in 2009, The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project, seeking to bring one million texts into the public domain.
“We are working together with a valuable global partner, CADAL, to create a digital library of high quality, academic, eBooks for use in China, North America and the world at large; I couldn’t be happier!” Robert Miller, General Manager of Digital Libraries for the Internet Archive, remarked on the collaboration.
The Chinese Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) is a consortium of over 70 Chinese University Libraries. CADAL will provide access to a leading set of libraries, the technical resources to display, and share the books inside China, as well as the staff needed for digitization. The Internet Archive will select the books, and provide equipment and processing resources. Both organizations will offer access and discovery tools for both scholars and citizen-scholars. Together, CADAL and the Internet Archive are contributing to a growing, global digital library.
Chen Huang, Digital Librarian and Deputy Director of Administrator Center for CADAL, shared the vision for the project: “We are pleased to be working with the Internet Archive. Together, we have developed a program that will allow Chinese university students to have access to materials that will enhance both specific knowledge, and exposure to broad trends and ideas.”
This phase of the partnership will last about 3 years and involve teams in the US, Shenzhen, China and ZheJiang University in Hang Zhou, China.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library with over 6 million texts online and a popular global website, with 34 million downloads a month. Their mission is “Universal Access to All Knowledge” – https://archive.org/
The China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) is a long term project of the Ministry of Education of China. The consortium aims to construct an academic digital library with high-level technology and abundant digital resources that are multidisciplinary, multilingual, and categorically diverse. http://www.cadal.cn
The announcement is here.
