Carolyn Said, Revolutionary chapter: Google's ambitious book-scanning plan seen as key shift in paper-based culture, San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 2004. The best account I've seen of the labor and logistics involved. Excerpt: 'The logistics involved are staggering. Stanford has 8 million volumes, Michigan 7 million....The effort is expected to take years. Although Google declined to discuss the cost, press reports have pegged it at about $10 per book. Anyone who has stood at a photocopier laboriously turning pages of a book to be copied can understand the Sisyphean nature of the task. Although sophisticated book-scanning technology exists that can turn pages via robotics -- Stanford owns one such machine, which cost in the six figures -- for now, at least, Google is taking a more low-tech approach. "It's human-operated," said John Wilkin, associate university librarian at the University of Michigan, where Google employees have set up shop since late summer to begin digitizing the collection. "It's interesting to see the people turn the pages; they can do it very quickly. It is essentially light industrial work."...At Michigan, Wilkin said he has been impressed by Google's approach. "The technology they have handles the books very carefully, it doesn't require them to be open much, it is fast in the way it captures and transfers information, it gives a high-quality image," he said. So far, at least, it doesn't sound particularly speedy. Wilkin said he believes an operator gets through about 50 books in a workday. At that rate, with, say, 20 people working every single day of the year, digitizing the library's 7 million volumes would take 19 years....For the universities, safeguarding the digital files for posterity is vital. "As long as we have the digital source files, we can preserve them for centuries," said Stanford's Herkovic. "We can't presume that Google is thinking about preservation for the centuries. Stockholders don't care about that, but Stanford does." Similarly, Michigan's Wilkin said, "We have a responsibility to this collection in perpetuity. It's a scary thing for people to hear 'forever,' but that's what our commitment is. I hope Google has a long, healthy life, but not many companies last as long as a university does." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/22/2004 09:22:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
