ITR: Million Book Project Equipment Funding

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Creating a universal, free to read, digital library containing over one million scanned books with optical character recognition to support full text searching is the goal of this million book project. Such a resource furthers the democratization of knowledge by making this large digital library available to scholars, students, and citizens around the world. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student success in their research endeavors. This 24x7x365 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for further research in database creation, OCR technique, machine metadata creation, and textual language processing research such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information mining. National Science Foundation resources would be amplified at a rate of almost twenty to one because the countries of India and China will be providing the labor to digitize these materials. In addition, members of the U.S. Digital Library Federation would ship materials to be scanned and returned. Private grant funding is being sought to cover shipping expenses.