Amy Marnell's Current Issue 5

Title: Another book-scanning project rivals Google's


Source: Eschool News

Link: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?i=50747;_hbguid=c475e569-593b-4573-9777-a46230a76d10

Date: Thu, Nov 29, 2007

This article talks about how almost 10 years ago a computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University started a project to "Digitize the published works of humankind and make them freely available online." More than 1.5 million books (many of them in Chinese) have been scanned in and 1000's more are being scanned daily.

"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, a computer science and robotics professor at the university who led the project."

The work has been carried out by scanning centers in India and China with the aid of $3.5 million in seed funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and contributions from computer hardware and software makers.

Half of the books are out of copyright or scanned with the permission of copyright holders and full texts instead of excerpts of copyright-protected material are expected to become available. Google along with Micro Corp. started a similar project, however Carnegie Mellon representatives say their is the largest university based digital library available and for non commercial reasons.

"Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and copyright lawyer working on the project, said the library’s mission includes making vast amounts of information freely available and preserving rare and decaying texts, among other things. The digital library so far contains books published in 20 languages, including 970,000 in Chinese, 360,000 in English, 50,000 in the southern Indian language of Telugu, and 40,000 in Arabic. "

I think this is an amazing resource and it allows for more global collaboration and research through technology by use of the Internet. The fact that it is available in so many languages relates to our literacy discussions and makes this resource very diverse so that it applies to everyone and not just English speaking people.