News from Chronicle Online
Microsoft pact will digitize thousands of books published before 1923
for online checkout at Cornell Library
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Oct06/library.di
gitizes.ssl.html
Oct. 20, 2006
By Susan Lang
ssl4@cornell
Cornell University Library (CUL) has signed a partnership with
Microsoft Corp. that will add public domain books to its online
collections, making "checking out" books even easier.
Under the agreement, many of CUL's English-language collection in the
public domain -- up to 300,000 books -- and other published materials
will be digitized, making them freely available on the Web.
Materials in the public domain are those that either were never
copyrighted or whose copyright has expired. They include all books
published prior to 1923.
Anyone with Internet access will be able to locate these materials
online using most Internet search engines and view them at CUL's Web
site or Microsoft's Live Book Search, a search service for book
content.
"When surveyed about their needs, CUL's users rate access to full
text online as one of their highest priorities, so this partnership
will enable us to respond to student and faculty expectations," said
Sarah E. Thomas, Cornell's Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "We
are just beginning to experience the transformative effects of ready
access to the cultural record of our civilization. The years ahead
will be exciting for us all."
Microsoft has contracted with Kirtas Technologies in Victor, N.Y., to
scan the materials using the world's fastest robotic scanners, which
can process up to 2,400 pages per hour -- or about 8 minutes per book.
"We are happy to be working with Kirtas Technologies on this very
important initiative for the university," said Cornell President
David Skorton, who has made increasing the impact of the university
beyond campus boundaries one of his goals. "They are a very good
choice for this endeavor because of the quality of their work and the
opportunity to showcase New York state talent."
Cornell plans to start the project this week, shipping out some 5,000
books and other monographs to Kirtas with plans to digitize some
100,000 monographs during the project's phase.
"Just these 100,000 books will add some 30 million pages of
scholarly content for Web users worldwide," said Oya Rieger, project
lead and associate director of CUL's Digital Library and Information
Technologies.
The project will greatly enhance Cornell's growing digitized
collection, which is freely available and already includes:
* 12,000 monographs and 2,000 journals;
* 45,000 visual images (maps, postcards and photographs); and
* almost 50 specialized collections (from anti-slavery and historical
mathematical documents to kinematic models for design).
In addition to materials it has digitized, the library also hosts
several repositories of such "born digital" materials as arXiv
(postings by users in physics, mathematics, nonlinear science,
computer science and quantitative biology) and DSpace (an open-source
repository for research data used at 100 institutions worldwide).
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