One Million Digitized Books
Today the University of Michigan Library is celebrating a significant milestone: We have just put the one millionth book digitized from our collections online. (I recommend clicking on the link. The page is pretty cool.) As far as I know Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its own collections digitized and available for search (and, when in the public domain, available for viewing.)
One million is a big number, but this is just the beginning. Michigan is on track to digitize its entire collection of over 7.5 million bound volumes by early in the next decade. So far we have only glimpsed the kinds of new and innovative uses that can be made of large bodies of digitized books, and it is thrilling to imagine what will be possible when nearly all the holdings of a leading research library are digitized and searchable from any computer in the world.
Yesterday the Library had a party to recognize the all the people who made this milestone possible. A lot of books have to be barcoded, moved, and moved again in order for a project like this to work, and there are many parts of the process where people could simply have questioned whether the effort was worth it. To the enormous credit of our library, there has been tremendous enthusiasm for both the work and its purposes. We all eagerly await (and it won’t be long) the next million, and the millions after that.
[…] One million digitized books on the way to 7.5… […]
February 2, 2008 @ 8:58 pm
great news! congratulations!
and an especially poignant message
to be delivering on groundhog day… :+)
now, how about a means of searching
_specifically_ for (and in) those books?
it would be nice to have this number be
_verifiable_ (not that we don’t trust you).
-bowerbird
February 3, 2008 @ 2:52 am
[…] term on the implications of digitizing books, and this is news that seems very much up that alley: “One Million digitized books” at the U of M library. From […]
February 3, 2008 @ 12:10 pm
[…] Read what our University Librarian Paul Courant has to say about it. […]
February 3, 2008 @ 6:58 pm
[…] University of Michigan announced the digitization of the millionth book this weekend. Most of the million volumes are products of […]
February 4, 2008 @ 12:45 pm
[…] Courant wrote in his Au Courant blog on February 2 that the University of Michigan achieved a significant milestone: it had just […]
February 4, 2008 @ 3:43 pm
http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2008/02/university-of-michigan-has-1-million.html
…..Michigan’s reputation will soar (rightly). Universities are highly competitive and international competition is getting more urgent, this is a knowledge race. Michigan will be at the head of a chasing pack.
February 6, 2008 @ 3:36 am
[…] the Dean of Libraries at U of M talks a bit about why this is so darned cool, and what we can expected in the […]
February 7, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
[…] Sure — you’ve probably heard the University of Michigan folks shouting from their blogs and website that they placed their “millionth book from their collection online.” Now, […]
February 7, 2008 @ 6:18 pm