Digitization 101

Below is an invitation from the Internet Archive (IA) to celebration Public Domain Day with them. The events are open to all and are free to attend. I've been to a few online IA events and they definitely know how to celebrate!

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The moon belongs to everyone, so says the 1927 hit musical composition, “The Best Things In Life Are Free.” We agree! In January of 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works will become as free as the moon and the stars, and we at Internet Archive, Creative Commons and many other leaders from the open world plan to throw a party to celebrate!

Next year, works published in 1927 will join the myriad creative building blocks of our shared culture heritage. The public domain will grow richer with books from authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, silent film classics like the controversial The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson and Fritz Lang’s dystopian Metropolis, and snappy musical compositions like You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream.

You can welcome new public domain works and party with us two ways:

Join us for a virtual party on January 19, 2023 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern time where we will celebrate our theme, The Best Things In Life Are Free, with a host of entertainers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the open world, including additional sponsoring organizations Library Futures, SPARC, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT HERE!

The Internet Archive will also host an in-person Film Remix Contest Screening Party on January 20, 2023 at 6pm at 300 Funston Ave in San Francisco. We will celebrate 1927 as founding year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while watching this year’s Public Domain Day Remix Contest winning entries, eating popcorn and ice cream. Come dressed in your best golden age of Hollywood inspired costume and walk the red carpet with the Internet Archive as we celebrate the entry of “talkies” into the public domain. REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO HERE!

I feel as if I grew up using microfilm, so I was intrigued by a history of that format published in December 2020. "Microfilm: The Rise, Fall, and New Life of Microfilm Collections" was written by the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, with the help of Rick Prelinger, professor at UCSC, and founder of the Prelinger Library. The 15-page paper is available in multiple formats.

In all the times I've used microfilm, I've never thought about its creation or what the inventor had in mind. Kahle wrote:

The dream of using motion-picture film stock to take photographs of document pages was pioneered and promoted by a brilliant American named Robert C. Binkley. Beginning in the late 1920s, he tested, wrote about and championed microfilm, not only as a means of making copies for preservation, but for distributed access to documents as well. Binkley saw the potential for democratization of knowledge and the positive impact that distributed learning might have on society. He advocated for research and scholarship that took place outside of university walls; for citizen-led collecting and preservation of historical documents; and for microfilm as a means of publishing books in small quantities, especially academic monographs that might not be profitable for the publishing trade. His writing is replete with visions of technology as a means to solve the age-old problems of scholarly publishing and as a means of increasing the historical understanding of the population as a whole. If he had lived to see the early Internet, he might have viewed it as validation of the ideas he expressed in the 1930s.

Microfilm was seen as increasing access! (Now we look to the Internet as a way of increasing access.)

Kahle goes on to write about the commercialization of the format, then how the format is no longer being used. There is microfilm which contains valuable sources and which needs to be saved. Digitization is an important option for preserving the information and making it more accessible. 

If you have microfilm or know of organizations that have microfilm, consider how to make its content more available. Yes, consider digitization.  If you cannot digitize yourself, find a partner.

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The Internet Archive has been digitizing books for many years and recently passed two million volumes. To do this work, the Internet Archive invented a scanner and the software which runs it. The Scribe scanner is used at their scanning centers around the world.  The Archive notes:

We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way--one page at a time.

They have posted a 40-second video of one of their Scribe scanners in action. The video is available on Facebook and Twitter. A big smile crossed my face watching it, given the beginnings of this blog was in digitization. Sadly, I could not get it to embed here.  

I've written about the Internet Archive in the past, including their digitization efforts. You can access past Internet Archive posts here.

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In a New York Times article, Brewster Kahle talks about expanding what the Internet Archive can do, if anyone (and everyone) can become a curator.  In terms of digitization, this text stood out to me:

A new book scanner was presented; Robert Miller, the archive’s director of books, literally unveiled it. This baby was only 40 inches tall and 62 pounds, versus the earlier version’s six feet and 350 pounds. In other words, it is portable, and can be taken to collections that are too fragile or cumbersome to make their own way to the archive. It’s much easier to use, too.

While that's not quite smaller enough to fit into anyone's home, it is a size that would fit into many libraries.

In my campus class on digitization, one student brought this article in for discussion.  In 2011, the Internet Archive announced that it had created a physical archive of books that it has digitized.  According to the Internet Archive, some libraries do not want the books returned after they have been digitized.  Their goal? 

The goal is to preserve one copy of every published work. The universe of unique titles has been estimated at close to one hundred million items. Many of these are rare or unique, so we do not expect most of these to come to the Internet Archive; they will instead remain in their current libraries. But the opportunity to preserve over ten million items is possible, so we have designed a system that will expand to this level. Ten million books is approximately the size of a world-class university library or public library, so we see this as a worthwhile goal. If we are successful, then this set of cultural materials will last for centuries and could be beneficial in ways that we cannot predict.

Read the article for more information on how the books are being stored, which I must admit is interesting.  The phrases "climate controlled" and "shipping containers" are often used together in my world!

The 67-minute video of this CNI Project Briefing will be of interest to librarians, those involved in digitization, and Dead Heads alike.  Very interesting to hear them talk about how they acquired content, how it was processed, etc., as well as how they are crowdsourcing some of the information.

Description: The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA) at UC Santa Cruz represents one of the most significant popular culture collections of the 20th Century and documents the band’s activity and influence in contemporary music from 1965 to 1995. At CNI’s spring 2012 membership meeting, UC Santa Cruz University Librarian Virginia Steel and Project Manager Robin Chandler discussed the particular challenges of merging a traditional archive with a socially constructed one.

I've seen that the call for participation in the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving Conference has been released.  The event will be held at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on Feb 24-25, 2011.  Registration information is also available.

Last Thursday at the Society of Ohio Archivists Annual Conference, I spoke on Google and Flickr (I'll blog about that presentation later this week). During my talk, I mentioned the Google Book Search settlement and gave a very quick take on what it meant. I mentioned that many people have commented on it and am now pleased to see that Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has weighed in on it via an editorial published in the Washington Post on May 19. This comes after the Internet Archive and others being denied to intervene as a defendant in the lawsuit.

In his editorial, Kahle wrote:

Whereas the original lawsuit could have helped define fair use in the digital age, the settlement provides a new and unsettling form of media consolidation.

If approved, the settlement would produce not one but two court-sanctioned monopolies. Google will have permission to bring under its sole control information that has been accessible through public institutions for centuries. In essence, Google will be privatizing our libraries.

Later he said this about the second monopoly:

But the settlement would also create a class that includes millions of people who will never come forward. For the majority of books -- considered "orphan" works -- no one will claim ownership. The author may have died; the publisher might have gone out of business or doesn't respond to inquiries; the original contract has disappeared.

Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to these in-copyright but out-of-print orphans, which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books.

A growing number of people who have come out against this settlement. Unfortunately, those voices aren't being heard by the court because of the way court proceedings go. Yes, some have filed an amicus brief -- friend of the court filing -- but it is unclear if they will have any impact. Perhaps the Justice Department will decide to take action?!

By the way, the judge has given a fourth month extension for people to opt out of the settlement. While this will help many copyright holders, Kahle is correct in that some will never come forward due to death, ignorance, or resignation to what they may see as being inevitable.

One other quote from Kahle is worth repeating. He said:

For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen.

Given the emphasis on rebuilding our infrastructure and improving education, that is a powerful image. Let's hope the Administration is listening.

Related posts:

• More information on the Google Book Settlement and how to opt out
• Rights holders have a limited time to opt out of the Google settlement
• Article: The End of Snippet View: Google Settles Lawsuit with Book Publishers
• More on the Google settlement: Is it all good?
• More on what the Google Book Search settlement means (and my vision of Google's future)
• Article: Is Google Deal a Setback for Rival Digitization Efforts?

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Technorati tags: Google, Digitization, Brewster Kahle

I'm surfing the Internet, looking through my Digitization 101 archives, and thinking about what is worth bringing to your attention as the year comes to a close. And so today, I'm posting an interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the force behind one of the mass book digitization programs. Yes, I've posted other interviews with him and I find each interesting, and containing nuggets of good information. This interview was done by KRON TV-4 in San Francisco did in July 2007. (Kahle portion of the video is less than 5 min.)

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Technorati tags: Brewster Kahle, Digitization

Wired magazine has nine photos with accompanying text about the Internet Archive's book digitization efforts. It is worth looking at.

Thanks to Disruptive Library Technology Jester for pointing this out.

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Book, Internet Archive

Actually, what is important about this article is the cost information.

The University's $100,000 one-year contract with the Internet Archive includes the Scribe scanner and an operator.

What will be digitized?

During the year, the Internet Archive will scan 22,000 Spanish-language dramas, 1,200 American and British travel accounts and a century of "Yackety Yack" yearbook.

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Technorati tag: Internet Archive

Published on Aug. 15, this interview with Brewster Kahle contains some great quotes -- all classic Brewster Kahle. For example:

Are you surprised to see libraries signing up with Google under restrictive terms?

I'm not surprised that a corporation wants to be the only place someone can get information, and I was not terribly surprised that some libraries went forward with this before they understood how they could do it on their own and how much it would cost to do it for themselves, not only to do the digitization but also to create services around these collections. I was surprised to see more libraries jumping on the Google bandwagon after demonstrating how libraries can do this and after actually doing it with the Open Content Alliance.

And in talking about how the Open Content Alliance can compete with Google, Kahle said:

Revolutions aren't started by majorities.

He does provide some cost information on having materials digitized by the OCA:

At an OCA regional scanning center, we'll scan your materials for 10¢ a page. Audio recordings we can do for about $10 a disc, and videos about $15 per hour. And we'll do all of the hosting for free; you can do the interfaces.

Definitely an article worth reading.

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Google, Brewster Kahle

Okay, what makes this article so interesting for me is that it describes the Scribe book-scanning system that has been developed by the Internet Archive. Here are the details:

• Combination of hardware and free software
• "takes high-quality images of books and then does a set of manipulations, gets them in optical character recognition and compressed, so you can get beautiful, printable versions of the book that are also searchable," according to Brewster Kahle
• Works with Linux (Ubuntu); support for Windows has been dropped
• Books are held in a V-shaped cradle
• Uses two digital cameras
• "Free software is used almost every step of the way"
• Books are scanned at the Library of Congress and the files are processed at the Internet Archive (ah, the Internet) using a cluster of 1,000 machines
• "Image processing for an average book takes about 10 hours on the cluster, and while the project still uses proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) software, Kahle says that many open source applications come into play, including the netpbm utilities and ImageMagick, and the software performs 'a lot of image manipulation, cropping, deskewing, correcting color to normalize it -- [it] does compression, optical character recognition, and packaging into a searchable, downloadable PDF; searchable, downloadable DjVu files; and an on-screen representation we call the Flip Book.'"

The Open Content Alliance has 40 members and is currently digitizing 12,000 books per months across five locations.

And what is being digitized at the Library of Congress? Well, it includes "Civil War and genealogical documents, technical and artistic works concerning photography, scores of books, and the 850 titles written, printed, edited, or published by Benjamin Franklin." Very cool!

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Thanks to the digitizationblog for finding this article. Mark, you truly made my day!

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Technorati tags: Brewster Kahle, Open Content Alliance, digitization

There is a 12-minute audio interview with Brewster Kahle on the Chronicle to Higher Education web site. The web site teaser says:

Brewster Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive and leader of the Open Content Alliance, a large-scale book-scanning project, outlines his vision for digital libraries.

Kahle begins by talking about the difference between his project (OCA) and the one being done by Google. The Open Content Alliance is digitizing 12,000 books per month in the U.S. They are doing full color scanning with OCR at 10 cents per page or an estimated $30 per book, according to what Kahle says in the interview. He believes this cost makes digitizing books more feasible for libraries.

As he later points out, digitizing one million books would cost $30 million. That would create a digital library that is larger than many town libraries. He says the library system in the U.S. is a $12 billion/year industry, so this cost would be less than 0.30% of the budget for one year. (He doesn't say where get got the $12 billion figure nor how he defines the term "library system".)

With more people relying on the Internet for information, he argues that getting books more findable online is important. (And who would argue against that?)

As always, it is interesting to hear what is on his mind. I find the $30/book figure to be quite intriguing. In December 2004, during his speech at the Library of Congress, he said that books could be digitized at a cost of $10 per book using a robotic scanner. Since then, he has developed the Scribe book scanner, which is a high-quality manual book scanner. I don't know what scanner and software is being used by the Open Content Alliance, but it would be informative to know what changed to go from $10 per book to $30 per book.

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Technorati tags: Open Content Alliance, Brewster Kahle, Google

In this interview, Brewster Kahle talks about orphaned works, copyright, book scanning projects and more. Two quick quotes:

We digitize 12,000 books a month and have 100,000 on the site now for free use and download.

We have been able to scan books for a total cost of 10 cents a page, so about $30 a book.

You can read the entire two-page interview here.

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Brewster Kahle

Printing books on-demand is undoubtedly the wave of the future. This article published in June 2006 announced a machine that makes this technology more readily available now. On Demand Books has begun beta testing its Espresso Book Machine, which can print black-and-white text for a 300-page paperback with a four-color cover, and bind it together in three minutes. The article states:

"Our goal is to preserve the economic and ergonomic simplicity of the physical book," said [Jason] Epstein [of On Demand Books], who laments the disappearance of backlist and ready access to books in other languages. By printing from digital files, ODB hopes to make warehousing -- —and much of today's distribution model -- —obsolete. "In theory," said Epstein, "every book printed will be digitized, which means the market will be radically decentralized. A bookstore with this technology, without any expense to themselves [other than the machine] can increase their footprint." Of course, that also means that Kinko's or Wal-Mart can transform themselves into mini-bookstores, especially given the machine's affordability. [Dane] Neller anticipates that it will retail for less than $100,000.

Not surprising, Brewster Kahle, who has also been involved both in digitizing books and printing books on demand, will be making books available through this service. New York Public Library is noted as getting one of these machines in September 2006.However, I don't see anything on the NYPL web site about it. Perhaps they are quietly launching the service?

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Brewster Kahle

On Dec. 13, Brewster Kahle spoke at the Library of Congress as part of their series on the Digital Future. I have listened to his speech twice and will undoubtedly listen to it even more because it shows us the future of digitization and proves that the future is occurring today. (For a link to his speech, go to this page.)

We already know that in many regions, digitization is something dreamed of due to the lack of money and knowledgeable resources. Some of us are fortunate to be in localities that have digitization vendors and training courses. For many who are involved in digitization, it is a time-consuming and costly venture. However, Brewster Kahle's speech (and accompanying photos) show us a world where digitization is inexpensive and truly changing what people access and how they access it. In his speech, he talks about digitizing books and then printing them on demand quite inexpensively. This could change the paradigm used by libraries of being lenders and make them low-cost booksellers instead.

Most amazing was the fact that he talked about digitizing a book for $10.00 by using a robotic scanner. Of course, automation always lowers the cost of something, but many of our projects cannot be automated, so we often see costs of $10.00 per page.

Now that he has shown us the future, we need to make this future a reality not only in some places, but everywhere. What he shows is too important for any of us to miss.

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Brewster Kahle, Book