Healey Keynotes

Million Book Digital Library surpasses its goal!

Carnegie Mellon University announced that the Million Book Project has over 1.5 million books. The digital library includes books from at least 20 different languages. In fact, there are more books in Chinese than in English.  It also contains rare books and books dating back to 1000 AD. See the project's progress report for more details.

Press release excerpt:

PITTSBURGH— The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

For the first time since the project was initiated in 2002, all of the books, which range from Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to “The Analects of Confucius,” are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of libraries.

“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, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

For more on digital books and libraries, check out the New Yorker article, Future Reading.

Would you curl up with a Kindle?

As the days grow shorter and the weather colder, I like nothing more than to retreat indoors, drink hot chocolate and curl up with a good book. Now there a device which may change the way we read. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, developed a new electronic book. The Kindle has been in the works for three years and was recently released to the public. It costs $399 and is being touted as the ipod for books. Amazon has over 90,000 downloadable titles for $9.99, as well as newspaper subscriptions. There is plenty of hype about the Kindle, including a cover story in Newsweek. However, will it live up to the expectations? And more importantly, can you curl up with it? 

More books online

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC), of which the UMass Boston is a member, will partner with Open Content Alliance (OCA) to build a digital library of its members’ materials. According the BLC press release, “The Consortium will offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials. Using Internet Archive technology, books from all 19 libraries will be scanned at a cost of just 10 cents per page.” OCA was created to provide public access to a digital collection of the world’s knowledge and the BLC is their first large-scale consortium partner.

In related news, the New York Times reports on the freedom of access to digital collections. See "Libraries shun deals to place books on web".

Fun with Dewey

Searching is sexy and fun with Ms. Dewey. MsDewey.com is a search site created by Microsoft to introduce Windows Live Search, which is an obvious imitation of Google. Ask Ms. Dewey any question and she will respond with humor and sarcasm. The search results are beside the point. If you take too long to type a question she will knock on the screen and point to the keyboard. This site is not recommended for real web searching but it is fun to see how Ms. Dewey will respond to your questions.