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The concept of OER describes educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees. A broad spectrum of frameworks is emerging to govern how OER are licensed for use, some of which simply allow copying and others that make provision for users to adapt the resources that they use.

This talk was given at the launch of Library Week in the foyer of the Wits library. During this week stakeholders will celebrate and promote library and information services throughout South Africa with the theme: "Access for all @ your library".

To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data. To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.