All Those Books Online, More to Come! - AP

Major digital library project led by Indian-origin Professor surpasses initial goal of books

Pittsburgh: Nearly a decade ago, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project with an astonishingly lofty goal: digitise the published works of humankind and make them freely available online.

The architects of the Universal Library project said on Tuesday they had surpassed their latest target, having scanned more than 1.5 million books and are continuing to scan thousands more daily. Most of the books scanned are in the Chinese language.

"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library," said Raj Reddy, a Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at the university who led the project.

Much of the recent work in the Million Book Project has been carried out by workers at scanning centres in India and China, helped by $3.5 million in seed funding from the U.S.National Science Foundation and in-kind contributions from computer hardware and software makers.

The U.S., China and India each have contributed $10 million to the project, undertaken with partners at China's Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and Egypt's Library at Alexandria.

At least half the books are out of copyright or scanned with the permission of copyright holders. Excerpts of copyright-protected works are available, though the organisers expect complete texts to become available eventually.

Other Projects

The project is not the first of its kind. Online search engine operator Google and software giant Microsoft have begun similar endeavours, though Carnegie Mellon representatives say theirs is the largest university-based digital library of free books and that its purpose is non-commercial.

It is a step toward the creation of an online library that would make traditionally published books available to all, said Professor Reddy. "The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling," he said in a statement - AP

Courtesy: AP and The Hindu, Madurai, November 29, 2007