The Professional Development Committee of the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame a “mini-symposium” on the topic of mass digitization on Thursday, May 21, 2009. This text documents some of what the speakers had to say. Given the increasingly wide availability of free full text information provided through mass digitization, the forum offered an opportunity for participants to learn how such a thing might affect learning, teaching, and scholarship. *
Setting the Stage
 Presenters and organizers |
After introductions by Leslie Morgan, I gave a talk called “Mass digitization in 15 minutes” where I described some of the types of library services and digital humanities processes that could be applied to digitized literature. “What might libraries be like if 51% or more of our collections were available in full text?”
Maura Marx
The Symposium really got underway with the remarks of Maura Marx (Executive Director of the Open Knowledge Commons) in a talk called “Mass Digitization and Access to Books Online.” She began by giving an overview of mass digitization (such as the efforts of the Google Books Project and the Internet Archive) and compared it with large-scale digitization efforts. “None of this is new,” she said, and gave examples including Project Gutenberg, the Library of Congress Digital Library, and the Million Books Project. Because the Open Knowledge Commons is an outgrowth of the Open Content Alliance, she was able to describe in detail the mechanical digitizing process of the Internet Archive with its costs approaching 10ยข/page. Along the way she advocated the HathiTrust as a preservation and sharing method, and she described it as a type of “radical collaboration.” “Why is mass digitization so important?” She went on to list and elaborate upon six reasons: 1) search, 2) access, 3) enhanced scholarship, 4) new scholarship, 5) public good, and 6) the democratization of information.
The second half of Ms. Marx’s presentation outlined three key issues regarding the Google Books Settlement. Specifically, the settlement will give Google a sort of “most favored nation” status because it prevents Google from getting sued in the future, but it does not protect other possible digitizers the same way. Second, it circumvents, through contract law, the problem of orphan works; the settlement sidesteps many of the issues regarding copyright. Third, the settlement is akin to a class action suit, but in reality the majority of people affected by the suit are unknown since they fall into the class of orphan works holders. To paraphrase, “How can a group of unknown authors and publishers pull together a class action suit?”
She closed her presentation with a more thorough description of Open Knowledge Commons agenda which includes: 1) the production of digitized materials, 2) the preservation of said materials, and 3) and the building of tools to make the materials increasingly useful. Throughout her presentation I was repeatedly struck by the idea of the public good the Open Knowledge Commons was trying to create. At the same time, her ideas were not so naive to ignore the new business models that are coming into play and the necessity for libraries to consider new ways to provide library services. “We are a part of a cyber infrastructure where the key word is ‘shared.’ We are not alone.”
Gary Charbonneau
Gary Charbonneau (Systems Librarian, Indiana University – Bloomington) was next and gave his presentation called “The Google Books Project at Indiana University“.
Indiana University, in conjunction with a number of other CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) libraries have begun working with Google on the Google Books Project. Like many previous Google Book Partners, Charbonneau was not authorized to share many details regarding the Project; he was only authorized “to paint a picture” with the metaphoric “broad brush.” He described the digitization process as rather straightforward: 1) pull books from a candidate list, 2) charge them out to Google, 3) put the books on a truck, 4) wait for them to return in few weeks or so, and 5) charge the books back into the library. In return for this work they get: 1) attribution, 2) access to snippets, and 3) sets of digital files which are in the public domain. About 95% of the works are still under copyright and none of the books come from their rare book library — the Lilly Library.
Charbonneau thought the real value of the Google Book search was the deep indexing, something mentioned by Marx as well.
Again, not 100% of the library’s collection is being digitized, but there are plans to get closer to that goal. For example, they are considering plans to digitize their “Collections of Distinction” as well as some of their government documents. Like Marx, he advocated the HathiTrust but he also suspected commercial content might make its way into its archives.
One of the more interesting things Charbonneau mentioned was in regards to URLs. Specifically, there are currently no plans to insert the URLs of digitized materials into the 856 $u field of MARC records denoting the location of items. Instead they plan to use an API (application programmer interface) to display the location of files on the fly.
Indiana University hopes to complete their participation in the Google Books Project by 2013.
Sian Meikle
The final presentation of the day was given by Sian Meikle (Digital Services Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries) whose comments were quite simply entitled “Mass Digitization.”
The massive (no pun intended) University of Toronto library system consisting of a whopping 18 million volumes spread out over 45 libraries on three campuses began working with the Internet Archive to digitize books in the Fall of 2004. With their machines (the “scribes”) they are able to scan about 500 pages/hour and, considering the average book is about 300 pages long, they are scanning at a rate of about 100,000 books/year. Like Indiana and the Google Books Project, not all books are being digitized. For example, they can’t be too large, too small, brittle, tightly bound, etc. Of all the public domain materials, only 9% or so do not get scanned. Unlike the output of the Google Book Project, the deliverables from their scanning process include images of the texts, a PDF file of the text, an OCRed version of the text, a “flip book” version of the text, and a number of XML files complete with various types of metadata.
Considering Meikle’s experience with mass digitized materials, she was able to make a number of observations and distinctions. For example, we — the library profession — need to understand the difference between “born digital” materials and digitized materials. Because of formatting, technology, errors in OCR, etc, the different manifestations have different strengths and weaknesses. Some things are more easily searched. Some things are displayed better on screens. Some things are designed for paper and binding. Another distinction is access. According to some of her calculations, materials that are in electronic form get “used” more than their printed form. In this case “used” means borrowed or downloaded. Sometimes the ratio is as high as 300-to-1. There are three hundred downloads to one borrow. Furthermore, she has found that proportionately, English language items are not used as heavily as materials in other languages. One possible explanation is that material in other languages can be harder to locate in print. Yet another difference is the type of reading one format offers over another; compare and contrast “intentional reading” with “functional reading.” Books on computers make it easy to find facts and snippets. Books on paper tend to lend themselves better to the understanding of bigger ideas.
Lastly, Meikle alluded to ways the digitized content will be made available to users. Specifically, she imagines it will become a part of an initiative called the Scholar’s Portal — a single index of journal article literature, full text books, and bibliographic metadata. In my mind, such an idea is the heart of the “next generation” library catalog.
Summary and Conclusion
The symposium was attended by approximately 125 people. Most were from the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. Some were from regional libraries. There were a few University faculty in attendance. The event was a success in that it raised the awareness of what mass digitization is all about, and it fostered communication during the breaks as well as after the event was over.
The opportunities for librarianship and scholarship in general are almost boundless considering the availability of full text content. The opportunities are even greater when the content is free of licensing restrictions. While the idea of complete collections totally free of restrictions is a fantasy, the idea of significant amounts of freely available full text content is easily within our grasp. During the final question and answer period, someone asked, “What skills and resources are necessary to do this work?” The answer was agreed upon by the speakers, “What is needed? An understanding that the perfect answer is not necessary prior to implementation.” There were general nods of agreement from the audience.
Now is a good time to consider the possibilities of mass digitization and to be prepared to deal with them before they become the norm as opposed to the exception. This symposium, generously sponsored by the Hesburgh Libraries Professional Development Committee, as well as library administration, provided the opportunity to consider these issues. “Thank you!”
Notes
* This posting was orignally “published” as a part of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame website, and it is duplicated here because “Lot’s of copies keep stuff safe.”