Legal Research

You can digitize books without Google

By admin

Carole Moore, my friend and the awesome chief librarian at my alma mater, lead a team that has digitized over 250,000 books in just a few years.

See the project and latest announcements here.

As part of the Canadian arm of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, congratulated Carole and her team:

“Milestone reached! 250,000 books from uToronto

When I talked with Carole Moore, the fantastic librarian from University of Toronto, about 6 years ago, she had a vision of scanning 250,000 books from their libraries. Well, a few days ago she succeeded. ( http://www.archive.org/details/university_of_toronto )

It has been a winding road to here, with financial help from Yahoo and Microsoft, from the Canadian government and from the University of Toronto– but she got there in grand style.

She had books from the 1400′s scanned, she has done all sorts of things with the able help from Jonathan Bengtson and Sian Meikle. The Internet Archive scanning center (our first) was started by Molly Davis and Gabe Juszel operating a cool page turning robot. The center is still run by Gabe with support from above and below and employs about 40 people.

All in all it is a hero librarian’s tale and a successful one.

250,000 books for free to the world from one of the great libraries in the world.

Go University of Toronto!

-brewster
Digital Librarian, Internet Archive”

Congratulations Carole Moore and the entire Univeristy of Toronto team for proving that you can do great work on a big scale and still stay independent.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on October 07, 2010 (boomark / email).