Every Book in The World?

Scanning and Scanning and Scanning and...

Scanning world's every book means turning many, many pages
By NATASHA ROBINSON – 4 days ago

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.

Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.
The manually scanning — at up to 600 pages a day — is much slower than Google's regular process.

"It's monotonous," the 24-year-old said. Then she knit her career hopes into the work.

"But it's still something that I'm learning about — how to interact with really old materials and working with digital imaging, which is relevant to art history."

Its going to take a very long time to copy these works too. The accessibility is still a problem. Unfortunately searching one after downloading it is cumbersome. But then again it is there and can be looked at.

In Chicago we have the Newberry Library, which is famous for its open door policy. It is easy to make an appointment to come in and look at the rare manuscripts. The efforts of Google should be applauded on the one hand and skeptically watched on the other. Data is something this behemoth cannot get enough of, but the quality, storage, indexing and retrieval of that information still has a bit of a ways to go. Using Google Scholar is still not as effective as a card catalogue. I do have faith that the right people will get it right one day. Its an important issue because students today always Google it first, and in many cases that is all they do. Educators and librarians, administrators and public officials should all focus on this. I don't think attention spans are getting longer.

Any thoughts?

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jMr8wAZqhesLHmGt1TW9jtUT04EgD908M3780