Library Tech Confidential

It seems that York University has joined the Univeristy of Toronto in the Internet Archive’s out-of-copyright book digitization project. This came to my attention via Michael Geist’s twitter feed.

Having been on boths sides of the Canadian Libraries project (scanning these 685 books on the evening shift at Robarts, and as grateful user of digitized materials like this), I’m very glad to hear that their electronic collection will continue to grow apace.

Archivists embrace digital page - “In a darkened and anonymous corner of the 7th floor of the University of Toronto’s main library, the books of the future are being created 14 hours a day…The ’scribes’ here are a combination of people and custom-built machines that can each scan up to 500 book pages in an hour. Multiply that by 13 such set-ups and two seven-hour shifts every weekday and you can see how the scanning centre manages to copy more than 1,000 books a week.” [Toronto Star]

Microsoft’s Live Search Books, which indexes texts digitized by the Internet Archive, is now out in beta. [CNet]

Some sample searches:Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, poetical works, Toronto, ontology.

The Tech Museum’s Tech Awards have named the Internet Archive a 2006 Prize Laureate in the education category in recognition of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and book scanning technologies.

Here’s a quick round-up of articles on the rival book scanning partnership involving (among others) Yahoo!, Microsoft, and The Internet Archive:

• Open Content Alliance Rises to the Challenge of Google Print [Information Today]
• In Challenge To Google, Yahoo Will Scan Books [New York Times]
• “Where Google makes the books it digitizes available for downloading only in Adobe Acrobat format, the OCA makes all the files available for downloading—from the raw images to the metadata. Books digitized by the OCA are freely available for browsing and downloading on the Internet Archive site.” [Library Journal]

Of course, the Internet Archive has been scanning books since before Google Print came to light; however, Google’s aggressive expansion appears to have spurred the tag-teaming with Yahoo! and MSN. For a taste of what the Open Content Alliance is producing, check out The Open Library; this document lays out founder Brewster Kahle’s vision for the project.

Legal action against Google by copyright holders has taken an interesting twist, too, with Google subpeonaing Yahoo! and Microsoft (among others) for documents meant to bolster its defence.