Carnegie Mellon University’s Million Book Project (MBP) Laurel Foundation – August 27, 2002

Project will make good information available to more scholars. The future of libraries is digital. Thesis

Why Do This?

Why “Libraries have played a vital role in the advance of human society. They have supplemented the formal education system by making human knowledge available to anyone who can read and has access to them. Human advance, including especially science and engineering, has depended on young people having access to books via libraries.”

Why “Libraries are very unevenly distributed across the world and within countries. Even in the US there are enormous differences. Now technology makes possible a universal world library in which every person has access to anything written.”

Why “The idea is compelling, the enhancements to education and learning can be intuited – and few, if anyone, would object to the conceptual framework.”

“In the end, this will be Vannevar Bush’s memex.”

Who Are the Partners?

Partners CMU’s Universal Library Project directors: Dr. Raj Reddy – Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science; co-chair of President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee Dr. Michael Shamos – Principal System Scientist; intellectual property attorney; co-director of e-commerce program

Dr. Jaime Carbonell – Director of the Language Technologies Institute (machine translation, auto-summarization, information mining) Dr. Robert Thibadeau – Principal Research Scientist specializing in scanning equipment and privacy issues Dr. Gloriana St. Clair – University Librarian; Digital Library Federation member Partners CMU’s Universal Library Project directors:

Partners Carnegie Mellon library faculty: Ms. Gabrielle Michalek – Head, Digital Library Initiatives; has pioneered 5 major digitization projects Ms. Erika Linke – Associate University Librarian (collections; intellectual property) Ms. Denise Troll Covey – Associate University Librarian (digital libraries; user studies)

U. S. Collection Partners University of California Berkeley Stanford University Indiana University University of Washington TriColleges (Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr) Pennsylvania State University

Partners National Science Foundation 2002 $1,000, $1,000, $1,000,000 for equipment and travel

Research Initiatives

Machine translation Massive distributed database Storage formats Use of digital libraries Distribution and sustainability Security

Research Initiatives Search engines Image processing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Copyright laws Language processing

Short-Term MBP Job Opportunities Copyright Manager Project/Logistics Manager – what book will be scanned, in which facility; when has it been scanned, when it is available Full-Time Programmer – develop delivery system Short-Term MBP Job Opportunities

Will be driven by research initiatives Long-Term MBP Job Creation

Collections

Best Books Feature Books for College Libraries 60,000 best books, published in 1988.

Collections Government Documents U. S. government produces about 100,000 documents per year; mostly in the public domain. Have Dept of Education materials; negotiating with other agencies; highly desired collections. British Parliamentary Papers – thousands, from 1950 back, copyright o.k.

Collections Subject Collections Sending proposals to small foundations for money to support copyright clearance for resources in subjects such as history and environment.

Collections University Press Negotiations National Academy Press We will scan early materials and exchange for some 2,500 they are scanning. MIT Press Discussed scanning some of their backlog.

Thank you for your interest. Gloriana St. Clair, Marguerite Q. Zappa, Alan Friedman,