Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.

Robert Darnton, Google & the future of books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

You can see the contents Google doesn't display for No-US-users (time period 1868-1922, moving wall) by using an US Proxy.

You can use a webbased anonymizer service like http://www.proxyking.com . Other such links see

http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml

Please take into account that most such services have download limitations making it impossible to download large Google's PDFs.

(There is some evidence that http://www.unbeatable.in has a 29,5 MB limitation, http://w2.hidemyass.com/ 25 MB )

Or you can install with a few clicks in your browser an US Proxy (find a proxy IP and port with e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+proxy ).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_proxies

Please note that it may be helpful to change to "Basic HTML mode" to see the pages!

See also:
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/google.shtml#outsideusa
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/2922570/

[Update: Screencast http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/6067526/ ]

On January 21, in one of his first official acts, President Barack Obama revoked the Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233 that severely limited access by the public to presidential records.

http://historycoalition.org/2009/01/21/president-obama-revokes-bush-presidential-records-executive-order/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/

http://seegras.discordia.ch/Blog/?p=33

Everybody is talking about “illegal copying” (most often in propagandist terms like “stealing” or “piracy”), but nobody of the opposite: Taking a work in public domain and slapping your copyright-notice over it; something which very much borders on plagiarism. And of course asserting to have a copyright on something which you are not entitled to is also a violation of copyright.

The very funny thing is, there is a repository of thousands of books whose copyright is violated this way. It’s books.google.com. Nowhere else, such a mass of works wrongly tagged “copyrighted material” can be found.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/01/another-publicly-funded-digitization.html

The Burney Collection of 17th and 18th newspapers was digitized in a public-private partnership, but the results are TA rather than OA. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) From a JISC press release (January 13):

The largest single online collection of English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries, the Burney Collection, is now available free of charge for the first time to Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils across the UK....
Digitised through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the British Library, then developed and hosted online by Gale/Cengage Learning, the digital version of the Burney Collection has been purchased in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK academic and research community at a national level....

Comment. Publicly-funded digitization projects have a lot to learn from publicly-funded research projects. The same principle that requires OA for publicly-funded research requires OA for publicly-funded digitization, especially when the works being digitized are in the public domain. The principle applies when "all or part" of the funding is from taxpayers. When this principle would scare off private funders, and the public funding isn't enough to complete the project, then we can offer the private funder a temporary revenue stream from a toll booth on public property, in exchange for its investment, by analogy with the embargo periods on publicly-funded research. But like an embargo, this is a compromise with the public interest and must expire. If it doesn't expire, then for some fraction of the cost of digitization, private companies could essentially buy exclusive rights to works in the public domain. The damage is notable even when the originals are available in non-digital form. But the damage is severe when the originals, as here, are rare and fragile and could never be viewed by most users in non-digital form.

This is absolutely right!

In 2007, the LMU Library's Department of Archives & Special
Collections was awarded a grant as part of the Local History Digital
Resources Project (LHDRP), supported by the infrastructure of the
California Digital Library (CDL) and Califa through Library Services and
Technology Act (LSTA) grant funding administered by the California State
Library (CSL). This grant funded the digitization of 200 postcards from
the Werner Von Boltenstern postcard collection, and laid the groundwork
for the Digital Library program.

From diglib@infoserv.inist.fr



http://digitalcollections.lmu.edu/socalpost.html

http://wardepartmentpapers.org/

After a traumatic and devastating fire in 1800, many historians though
that the early files of the United States War Department were
essentially lost forever. Thankfully, the Center for History and New
Media at George Mason University recently completed a decade long
project to locate all of these records and place them online here. The
collection is a very important one, because during this time period the
War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, and
naval affairs. The project was begun in earnest by Ted Crackel in the
mid-1990s and it involved visits to over 200 repositories and consulting
over 3,000 collections in the United States, Canada, England, France,
and Scotland. Now, visitors can browse through 55,000 documents, and
also perform detailed searches, complete with links to digitized images
of each document. Interested parties can also browse the collection by
year or person of interest. In short, this is an extremely valuable
project that will be of interest to those with a penchant for American
history, and early American military history in particular.