May 15, 2006
Libraries R Us
What will happen when all books have been digitized, and when every library can provide access to the holdings of every other library? And when that access can be had anywhere one has Internet access?
That future is closer than you think -- a whole lot closer, as the New York Times Sunday Magazine reports:
At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.Meanwhile, digitization is going full speed ahead in China:But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.
Superstar, an entrepreneurial company based in Beijing, has . . . already digitized 1.3 million unique titles in Chinese, which it estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.Yes, there are roadblocks -- discussed at length in the article -- but the trend is unstoppable.
Posted by David on May 15, 2006 10:15 PM
Which library would you most like to see digitised and thrown open to the world? I'd have thought that the Vatican library could be pretty interesting.
(The Library at Alexandria is not a permitted answer.)
Posted by: on May 16, 2006 6:44 AM
This raises the question of what is meant by digitization. On one hand you have projects exemplified by the British Library's creation of online virtual books for some of its greatest treasures -- most of them manuscripts, however, and of interest primarily for providing simulated access to the objects themselves, rather than their texts.
Welcome as such endeavors are, the type of digitization discussed in the Times article is far more transformative, entailing not just the imaging of books, but the digitization of their contents. For this, the great national libraries, the libraries of record, would be the great goals. Full online, machine-searchable access to all the contents of the Vatican libraries would be wonderful, but first give me similar access to the Library of Congress and the British Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale!
Posted by: David on May 16, 2006 8:48 AM
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But don't be *too* quick to ditch that hard copy! Otherwise a random site virus might be a worse disaster than the the loss of the library of Alexandria. For that matter even a minor change in the way data is stored could also cause irreperable loss. More subtle problems could also be caused by someone who decides to "edit" a text. If he's subtle enough in the way he altered the files how would you know that the book has been changed without the original to compare it to? This is cool but paper had better stay with us for a long time to come.
Posted by: Small Pink Mouse on May 17, 2006 3:44 PM
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