The Boston College Libraries have joined a major digitization project involving the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) and the Open Content Alliance to build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 BLC member institutions. The BLC is the first large-scale consortium to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the Open Content Alliance.

The initial content of Boston College's collections being digitized includes books about the Jesuit order.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.

The OCA archive will contain globally sourced digital collections, including multimedia content, representing the creative output of humankind.

All content in the OCA archive will be available through the website. In addition, Yahoo! will index all content stored by the OCA to make it available to the broadest set of Internet users. Finally, the OCA supports efforts by others to create and offer tools such as finding aids, catalogs, and indexes that will enhance the usability of the materials in the archive.