11 Sep 2009

China-America Digital Academic Library (CADAL)
Zhejiang University Libraries, Hangzhou, China.
Self-description:
"The objective of this [2004 - ed.] project is to create a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, primarily in the English language, available to everyone over the Internet. This task is accomplished by scanning the books and indexing their full text. The text file is created, where possible, through optical character recognition. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7x365, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background. Typical large high-school libraries house fewer than 30,000 volumes. One million volumes is the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University. The total number of different titles indexed in OCLC's WorldCat is about 48 million. One million books, therefore, is more than the holdings of any high-school, equivalent to the library at a substantial university and a significant fraction of all available books. [...] National Science Foundation is providing funding for Scanners, Computers, Servers, and Software. These resources from NSF are augmented by almost twenty to one since China and India will be providing the necessary manpower (2,000 man years each, over a four year period)."
Site contents:
* Vision;
* Current Status (Processing);
* Technical Details (Data Production, Metadata, Database Creation, Specifications of Transferring Resource, Sample);
* Content Selection;
* People;
* Partners;
* Funding Sources;
* CopyRt Disclaimer;
* FAQ;
* Contact Us;
* Jobs;
* Content (#Services, #Help, #About CADAL, #Login, #Mode; Search, Browse. #Searches: Quick, Advanced, Image, Video, Calligraphy. #Book Types: Ancient, Minguo, Journal, Modern, Dissertation, Painting, Video, English. CADAL Center, #CALIS (China Academic Library & information System), #Zhejiang University DCD Laboratory, #CADAL Team).
[A bi-lingual (EN, CN) site. The search box on the site is extremely slow, hence it is not clear whether it at present (Sep 2009) delivers links to freely accessible online books - ed.]
URL http://www.cadal.cn/enc/
Internet Archive (web.archive.org) [the site was not archived at the time of this abstract]
Link reported by: tmciolek (tmciolek--at--coombs.anu.edu.au)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Corporate info./ possibly Study (e.g. full text books)
* Publisher [academic - business - government - library/museum - NGO - other]: Library
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Useful
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 300