The Million Book Digitization Project with India and China

Gloriana St. Clair
University Librarian
Carnegie Mellon University

The vision of the Million Book Project is to scan a million books to make these materials available worldwide on the Web. One commentator noted that “In the end, this will be Vannevar Bush’s memex.” The National Science Foundation has recently provided funding for equipment and travel. Partners in India and China have received funding for the labor they are supplying, have installed equipment, and are scanning files with accompanying metadata. Partners in the U.S. have supplied books to be shipped to India for scanning. Research initiatives allied with the project include machine translation, massive distributed databases, storage formats, digital library use, distribution and sustainability, and security. Important issues of sustainability are still being studied.