Electrifying Knowledge by Tom Imerito (Pittsburgh Quarterly, Summer 2009)

“An effort to scan the world’s books is under way – creating a growing, globally accessible virtual library that had its start in Pittsburgh …” Raj Reddy, Gloriana St. Clair, Michael Shamos, and Jaime Carbonell were among those interviewed for this article.

In July, I had written a post on how millions of books are freely available on the Internet Archive. I have now created a separate page – Online Libraries where I have posted information on various libraries and their contents – particularly those which host books on subjects of my interest – philosophy, economics and politics. Do check it out.

Google’s mass digitization project results in a database of shared content called Google Scholar. This is not at all the same premise as open access.

Paul Courant is Dean of University Libraries at the University of Michigan. Recently, he posted on his blog, Au Courant, defending the decision on collaboration between U-M Libraries and Google Scholar, which will result in the digitization of approximately 7.0 million books owned by U-M Libraries to be added to the Google Scholar database. The project is expected to take six years to complete. Read more about that project here (August 2005 report by U-M).

This week, Chronicle of Higher Education (Nov 26 2007) reporter Jeffrey R. Young wrote a brief story with a subtly different spin on this public discussion. You can read that brief report here.

On Tuesday, Nov 27 2007, there was another brief report published in the Chronicle about a similar book digitization project by Carnegie Mellon University, called the Million Book Project - read about that here.