T OPENCOURSEWARE

[Overview]

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale, web-based electronic
publishing initiative launched by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) to promote open dissemination of knowledge and information.
A pilot version of the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) was available
online in September 2002, with 32 course materials of MIT. In September
2003, the site was officially launched with several hundred course
materials. In March 2004, 500 course materials were available in 33
different topics. In May 2006, 1,400 course materials were offered by
34 departments belonging to the five schools of MIT. In November 2007,
all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated
courses per year. In November 2005, the MIT launched the OpenCourseWare
Consortium (OCW Consortium) as a collaboration of educational
institutions creating a broad body of open educational content using a
share model. One year later, the OCW Consortium included the courses of
100 universities worldwide.

2004: PROJECT GUTENBERG EUROPE

[Overview]

In January 2004, Project Gutenberg spread across the Atlantic with the
launching of Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed
Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko, a non-governmental
cultural and educational project located in Belgrade, Serbia. DP Europe
uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders. DP Europe
is a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several
European languages by volunteer translators. In April 2004, DP Europe
was available in 12 languages. The long-term goal is 60 languages and
60 linguistic teams representing all European languages. DP Europe
supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages.
Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every
character in any language. DP Europe finished processing its 100th book
in May 2005 and its 500th book in October 2008. DP Europe operates
under "life +50" copyright laws. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe
will provide eBooks for several national and/or linguistic digital
libraries.

[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]

In 2004, multilingualism became one of the priorities of Project
Gutenberg, like internationalization. Michael Hart went off to Europe,
with stops in Paris, Brussels and Belgrade. In Belgrade, he met with
the team of Project Rastko, to support the creation of Distributed