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Yale Online Book Project Hits Setback
July/August 2008
by Robert McGuire
Last fall, the Yale University Library belatedly
joined the trend toward mass digitization of its collections, signing on with
another latecomer, Microsoft Corporation, to scan 100,000 books over the next
year. Microsoft was to foot the bill in exchange for the right to make the
books available on a Microsoft website. But in May, Microsoft abruptly shut
down its project, leaving Yale and the company’s other library partners unsure
what they’ll do next.
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Robotic cameras use puffs of air to turn each page.
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“It was a bolt from the blue,” says University
Librarian Alice Prochaska about the decision. The company said simply that it
was planning to focus on more lucrative areas. But it was widely speculated
that Microsoft decided it could not catch up with Google, which had begun a
more aggressive digitization project a year earlier.
Although Microsoft has now dropped the online book
search tool that until recently could be found on its website, it may continue
to pay for scanning of Yale’s books for another few months. Prochaska hopes
that 50,000 books will have been scanned by that time, many of them volumes
that exist in no other libraries. Yale will make them available on its own
website and on the Internet Archive, a nonprofit repository of digitized books
and other media.
Yale’s books are being scanned by a vendor called
Kirtas Technologies, at a facility in Wallingford, Connecticut. They are placed
in the tender care of robotic cameras that use puffs of air—“gentler than the
human hand,” Kirtas promises—to turn each page and take a digital photo.
“We’re disappointed not to be continuing to work with
Microsoft,” says Prochaska, “but we felt they gave us a good deal, and they
gave us what has turned out to be a free startup for a very important process
that we do intend to continue.” Prochaska says that it’s too early to know just
how the university will proceed with mass digitization.
Besides the obvious benefit of faster and more
far-flung access, vast virtual libraries might also open new kinds of scholarly
inquiry. For example, Prochaska says, imagine if you could search the full text
of Benjamin Franklin’s journals by keyword and place, search the full text of
other diarists of his time, search the full text of all the political theater
and playbills in France, and then pin it all on a map of Paris. Seeing who was
crossing paths when a given play was staged might deepen our understanding of
the political discourse circulating in that period.
Data mining like that, Prochaska says, could mean
“whole new disciplines springing into existence, using computers to process
data so massive it was impossible to handle before. This is pioneering stuff.”  |
