Frequently
Asked Questions
About
the Million Book Project
What
is the current status of the Million Book Project?
Use
Internet Explorer to access the Million Book Project/Universal Library sites:
- Million Book
Project [The Universal Library, China site], available http://www.ulib.org.cn
- Million Book
Project [Digital Library of India], available http://dli.iiit.ac.in
- Million
Book Project [The Universal Library, U.S. site], available http://www.ulib.org
As of June 2004
-
- Project partner
OCLC has provided guest IDs to Indian partners to enable them to capture metadata
from the OCLC online catalog and has agreed to help identify source libraries
for acquiring selected materials. (Partners in China are members of OCLC so
have no need for guest IDs.) OCLC is developing a digital registry that will
eventually be used in the Project to help prevent duplicate digitization of
books. OCLC might also provide a permanent archive of the Million Book Collection
and enhanced access to the books via links in WorldCat.
- The Internet
Archive is a project partner, providing a permanent archive for the Million
Book Collection, quality control tools, and assistance with acquiring books.
- Indian and Chinese
partners have had extended visits at Carnegie Mellon to discuss project logistics
and technologies. Carnegie Mellon participants and other project partners
in the United States have visited India and China to train the scanning personnel
and meet with project administrators to develop project plans. Carnegie Mellon
University Libraries prepared and distributed a manual detailing the workflow
and standards for metadata capture and digitization.
- Scanning equipment
and related software have been purchased and delivered to India and China.
Recently purchased equipment includes color scanners and microfilm scanners.
Additional equipment will be purchased in the future.
- Over 50,000
books have been scanned to date. Fourteen scanning centers are currently running
in India alone. The goal is to have 100 scanning stations digitizing books,
each operating two shifts a day, producing 3000 scanned pages per day.
- Chinese partners
are digitizing unique collections in Chinese libraries and books in their
collection for which the Million Book Project has secured copyright permission.
Chinese partners are coming to the United States in February 2004 to select
additional materials. Indian partners are digitizing unique collections and
government textbooks that were published in eleven of the eighteen official
languages in India. They also scanned a pilot shipment of thousands of books
from the United States. Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is digitizing
Carnegie Mellon technical reports and other materials selected for the Million
Book Project that for various reasons cannot be shipped abroad.
- Kiosks and Internet
cafes have been developed and installed in India to provide people with Internet
access.
- Carnegie Mellon
School of Computer Science has developed a system to support free-to-read
access to the digitized books on the web. The system provides tools to add
books to the collection and generate PURLs and usage reports. Future developments
will enable the Million Book Collection to be indexed by popular Internet
search engines like Google and harvested via the OAI protocol. Spring semester
2004 Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is working with students in a Human-Computer
Interaction course to prepare specifications to enhance the design and functionality
of the system.
- Project partners
at the University of California, Merced, have funded the hiring of a full
time employee for one year to initiate copyright permission requests. UC Merced
will also be a mirror site for the Million Book Collection.
- Investigations
are underway for one or more partners to provide print-on-demand service for
the Million Book Collection. Meetings were held with ProQuest in November
2003. America OnLine (AOL) has expressed interest in the Million Book Collection.
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What
Purpose Does the Million Book Project Serve? What Problems Does the Project
Address?
Research
reveals that students and faculty look online first when they need information
because of the speed and convenience of online access. They prefer remote access
to electronic resources rather than having to go to a physical library facility.
Though faculty and graduate students often turn to a library web site or licensed
electronic resources when they need information, undergraduate students tend
to start with popular Internet search engines like Google because these search
engines are more convenient and easier to use than library databases. Most students
believe the information they find on the open Internet is good enough to use
in their coursework. Unfortunately, only about 6% of the surface web content
indexed by popular search engines is appropriate for student academic work.
Faculty are concerned that the lack of quality resources on the surface web
is having a negative impact on the quality of student learning.
Meanwhile, the increasing availability and use of online bibliographic databases,
the increasing number of scholarly publications, and the increasing cost of
library materials have created a situation wherein libraries are spending more
money but acquiring fewer materials. Interlibrary loan is increasing, but the
turn-around time is often inadequate for both the highly competitive research
conducted by faculty and the shorter deadlines of students. Consequently, user
satisfaction is decreasing. Research recently conducted by Carnegie Mellon University
Libraries to improve our understanding of the graduate student experience exposed
their frustration with the amount of time it takes to get the materials they
need for teaching and coursework because the Libraries' electronic resources
are not easy to use. To save time and aggravation, they often turn to an Internet
search engine first. Among the concerns they expressed was the difficulty of
acquiring old journals and out-of-print books. Collection size, the turn-around
time required for interlibrary loan, and the cost of document delivery constrain
their selection of research topics, the quality of their work, and their grade
point average. Lack of free and speedy access to quality resources has a negative
impact on the timeliness and success of academic work. Research indicates that
most students and faculty perceive a significant gap between their need for
speed and convenience and the service their library is providing.
Beyond the boundaries of these problems, tremendous disparity exists across
the nation and around the world in the size and accessibility of library collections.
Some single institutions, like Harvard and Yale, have more books in their libraries
than some entire states have in all of their libraries combined. In our rapidly
changing world, lifelong learning and access to books have become essential
to employment, health, peace, and prosperity. Greater public access to information
is consistent with the goals of education and deliberative democracy. The expectation
is that greater access to information will enhance respect for diversity and
pluralism, alter the ways in which people work and deliberate together, and
better equip people to understand and challenge the world around them. The Million
Book Project will digitize a large body of published literature and offer it
free-to-read on the surface web - providing students, faculty, and lifelong
learners with rapid, convenient access to quality resources. Equitable, world-wide
access to the Collection will contribute to the democratization of knowledge
and empowerment of a global citizenry. An important byproduct of the Collection
will be the existence of a test bed that stimulates and supports much-needed
research in information storage and management, search engines, imaging processing,
and machine translation. top
For More Information
"How students search: Information seeking and electronic resource use"
(EDNER [Formative Evaluation of the Distributed National Electronic Resource]
Project, Issues Paper 8, 2002). Available: http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner/ip/ip08.rtf
S. Jones and M. Madden,
"The Internet Goes to College: How Students Are Living in the Future with Today's
Technology" (Pew Internet & American Life Project, September 15, 2002). Available:
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=71
S. Lawrence and L. Giles, "Accessibility and Distribution of Information on the
Web." Nature 400 (1999): 107-109. Summary available: http://wwwmetrics.com/
LibQual+TM Spring 2002 Survey Results, Association of Research Libraries (Texas
A&M University, 2002). LibQual+TM Spring 2003 Survey Results, Association of Research
Libraries (Texas A&M University, 2003). See http://www.libqual.org
D. B. Marcum and G. George, "Who Uses What? Report on a National Survey of Information
Users in Colleges and Universities," D-Lib Magazine 9, 10 (October 2003).
Available: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october03/george/10george.html
OCLC, "How Academic Librarians Can Influence Students' Web-Based Information Choices"
(White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students, June 2002). Available:
http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/community/informationhabits.pdf
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What
are the research issues in the Million Book Project?
- Information
storage and management--The MBP when completed will produce approximately
250 million pages or 500 billion characters of information. The storage requirements
for the image files will be approximately 50 petabytes--an order of magnitude
larger than any publicly available information base. Creating and managing
such a vast information base poses many technological challenges and provides
a fertile test bed for innovative research in many areas (described below).
The MBP is a multi-agency, multi-national effort that will require the database
to be globally distributed. For location independent access, this globally
distributed database should appear to be a virtual central database from any
place around the world. Mirroring the database in several countries will ensure
security and availability. The network speeds at the various nodes would be
different. Research in distributed caching and active networks would be needed
to ensure that the look and feel of the database is the same from any location.
- Search
engines--The search engines of today work on the principle of keyword
matching and perform searches in one language at a time. With a large corpus
of multilingual data provided by the MBP, along with multilingual summarization
and translation tools, a well-directed research effort would be needed to
ensure concept- and content-based retrieval of knowledge from across multilingual
data.
- Image
processing--The accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), even
in some of the most developed languages, is hindered by the bad quality of
the images. This is particularly true for older books and those that use ancient
fonts for which the OCR is not tuned. Even the very best OCR accuracy of the
order of 98% may not be acceptable in some cases. In order to obtain an improved
accuracy close to 100%, advanced image processing research that will perform
recognition beyond the character level will be needed. With the availability
of large test data from the MBP and the exponentially increasing computing
power of the microprocessors, well-directed image processing research would
lead to near perfect optical recognizers.
- Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) in non-Romanic languages--The MBP will
have considerable content in many Indian and Chinese languages. The development
of OCR in many of the Indian Languages is far more complicated. For example,
some of the problems in the development of OCR for Indian languages are:
- There are
1500 spoken Indian languages and 17 scripts.
- Unlike English,
where the number of characters to be recognized is less than 100, Indian
scripts have several hundred characters to be recognized.
- Non-uniformity
in the spacing of the characters within a word because of the presence
of Consonant Conjuncts (vowel + consonant) makes OCR more difficult. Also,
the presence of Consonant Conjuncts results in improper line segmentation.
Programs will have to do further processing to segment the lines.
- Consonants
take modified shapes when attached with the vowels. Vowel modifiers can
appear to the right, on the top or at the bottom of the base consonant.
Such consonant-vowel combinations are called modified characters. In addition,
two, three or four characters can combine to generate a new complex shapes
called compound characters. These characters are very difficult for a
machine to recognize.
- In scripts
like Bangla and Devnagari, all the characters in a word are connected
by a unique line called shirorekha (also called head line). In these scripts,
character segmentation is especially difficult.
- In south
Indian scripts, vowels occur only at the beginning of a word as against
the vowels in Oriya, where they occur anywhere within a word. So, the
language morphology for some groups of scripts is different from the others.
- There is
no universally acceptable standard encoding scheme for Indian scripts.
This necessitates a scheme where the output labels from the OCR system
can be mapped to the labels used by the typesetter through a mapping table.
Because of the non-availability of quality-segmented data, the recognition
rate of the Indian language OCR cannot be pushed beyond 90% using character
level recognition. To obtain a higher recognition rate, word level information
in the form of dictionary has to be used. A word corpus is essential,
but such a word corpus for most of the Indian scripts is not available
today. The MBP will be able to provide this important missing piece. Once
such data is available, it will be possible to use advances in image recognition
to develop the OCR in Indian and other non-Romanic languages.
- Copyright
laws and digital rights management--In the new digital economy, providing
democratic access to information while suitably and reasonably rewarding the
innovator is possible. The largest repertoire of free software available on
the web in many cases has been the outcome of state supported research. This
free availability of software has in fact contributed to more developments
and hence an exponential growth of knowledge. Even in literary and scholarly
publications, authors have experienced increase sales of their work whenever
they are made freely available on the web. This is in tune with observations
in the new economy that the companies that make more and more of their software
freely available on the web, have their market capitalization enhanced. The
MBP, with its proposed plans to make a large knowledge base freely available,
will provide useful statistics for testing many economic and sociological
models.
- Language
processing--The MBP will produce an extensive and rich test bed for
use in further textual language processing research. It is hoped that at least
10,000 books among the million will be available in more than one language,
providing a key testing area for problems in example based machine translation.
In the last stage of the project, books in multiple languages will be reviewed
to ensure that this test bed feature is accomplished.
Many believe
that knowledge is now doubling at the rate of every two to three years.
Machine summarization, intelligent indexing, and information mining are
tools that will be needed for individuals to keep up in their discipline
work, in their businesses, and in their personal interests. This large digitization
project will support research in these areas. This will be of greater significance
for the Indian languages where new tools for summarization, grammar and
spell checking, thesaurus and translation dictionaries need to be developed
ab initio.
The data provided
by the MBP with the right research inputs will facilitate the development
of language- and location-independent intelligence amplifiers for furthering
information creation. top
What
content will be included in the Million Book Project? What scanning is currently
underway? What about copyright permissions?
Our initial thinking
was to take a staged approach to collection development on a discipline-by-discipline
basis. However, discussion with project partners and potential partners in
November 2001 at a collection planning meeting funded by NSF resulted in the
decision to focus on providing free-to-read access to multiple collections.
Copyrighted works will be digitized upon receipt of permission from the copyright
holder to include the works in the Million Book Project.
Our partners
in India and China are currently digitizing local materials. Our Chinese partners
are digitizing unusual and unique rare collections in Chinese libraries. Our
Indian partners are digitizing government textbooks published in eleven of
the eighteen official languages in India.
- U.S. works that
aren't copyrighted, like U. S. government documents.
- U.S. out of
copyright works
As of August 2002, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is pulling books published
before 1923 and boxing them for shipment to India. We estimate digitizing
45,000 titles in the Carnegie Mellon collection, including biographies and
science books.
We have identified approximately 2000 titles in Books for College Libraries
that are out of copyright. The next step is to locate these books in Carnegie
Mellon's library collection or the collections of our project partners and
ship them abroad.
- U.S. copyrighted
works
We've received permission from the National Academy Press to digitize all
of their titles published through 1994--approximately 3500 titles. As of August
2002, hundreds of these books have been pulled from Carnegie Mellon?s library
collection and boxed for shipment to India in the immediate future. A future
step is to locate the remaining titles in partner libraries. Those that are
not already available in Chinese libraries will be located in the U.S. and
shipped abroad for scanning.
In June 2002 we began sending letters to U.S. publishers seeking permission
to digitize all of their out-of-print or remaindered in-copyright works. Negotiations
are underway with many academic presses. We are preparing to send letters
to publishers seeking permission to digitize all of their copyrighted titles
listed in Books in College Libraries, approximately 58,000 titles. When permission
is granted, we will locate the books in partner libraries. Books that are
not available in Chinese and Indian libraries will be located in U.S. partner
libraries and shipped abroad for scanning.
Carnegie Mellon has committed to digitizing the university's many technical
report series--approximately 5500 titles. Permission to digitize the reports
is being sought from the copyright holders. Scanning the Robotics Institute's
technical reports began in August 2002. Permission is also being sought to
scan technical reports published by IBM and Microsoft.
- Other
We want to digitize the British Parliamentary Papers and are currently investigating
whether these documents are copyrighted. We believe that many of these works
are available in libraries in India.
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Who
are the key U.S. participants in the Million Book Project?
- Dr. Mark Kamlet,
Provost, Carnegie Mellon--Kamlet led the delegation to China in 2002 and will
lead the delegation to India in 2003.
- Dr. Raj Reddy,
Simon University Professor, Institute for Software Research International
(ISRI), Carnegie Mellon
- Dr. Gloriana
St. Clair, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon
- Dr. Ching-chih
Chen, Professor, Simmons University
- Dr. Michael
Shamos, Distinguished Career Professor and Principal System Scientist, School
of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
- Dr. Jaime Carbonell,
Director of the Language Technologies Institute and Professor, School of Computer
Science, Carnegie Mellon
- Mr. Eric Burns,
Director of Software Development for the Universal Library (parent project
of the Million Book Project), School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
- Ms. Gabrielle
Michalek, Head, Archives and Digital Library Initiatives, Carnegie Mellon
University Libraries
- Ms. Denise Troll
Covey, Principal Librarian for Special Projects, Carnegie Mellon
- Ms. Erika Linke,
Senior Librarian and Associate Dean of University Libraries (Collection and
User Services), Carnegie Mellon
- Mr. Brewster
Kahle, Internet Archive
- Phyllis Spies,
Andrew Wang, and Lorraine Normore, OCLC
- Bruce Miller,
University Librarian, University of California at Merced
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Who
are the other partners in the Million Book Project?
- China--Representatives
from these institutions met with key U.S. participants in the U.S. in 2001
and in China in 2002:
- Chinese
Ministry of Education
- Chinese
Academy of Science
- Fudan University
- Nanjing
University
- Peking University
- Tsinghua
University
- Zhejiang
University
- India--Representatives
from these institutions met with key U.S. participants in the U.S. in 2002
and in India in 2003:
- Indian Institute
of Science, Bangalore
- International
Institute of Information Technology
- Indian Institute
of Information Technology
- Anna University,
Chennai
- Mysore University,
Mysore
- University
of Pune, Pune
- Goa University,
Goa
- Tirumala
Tirupati Devasthanams, Tirupathi
- Shanmugha
Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy, Tanjore
- Arulmigu
Kalasalingam College of Engineering, Srivilliputhur
- Maharashtra
Industrial Development Corporation, Mumbai
- United States--The
following institutions have agreed to participate in the early stages of the
Million Book Project. Additional institutions have agreed to join the project
when we have gathered data on the time and cost of sending materials abroad,
having them safely returned, and delivering electronic copies of the scanned
materials to the home institution.
- Indiana
University
- Pennsylvania
State University
- Stanford
University
- TriColleges
(Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr)
- University
of California, Berkeley
- University
of California, Merced
- University
of Pittsburgh
- University
of Washington
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What
university/scholarly presses are participating in the program?
The University
of Texas Press, Brookings Institution, the American Meteorological Society,
American Institute of Biologocal Sciences, and Rand McNally are among the
presses that have given permission to digitize their out-of-print in-copyright
books. National Academy Press has given us permission to digitize all of their
books published prior to 1995. As of June 2004, we are in negotiation with
many other presses, including Johns Hopkins, Duke, Penn State, and the Russell
Sage Foundation. top
How
is the Million Book Project supported?
To date, two
grants totalling $3.6 million have been received from the National Science
Foundation to purchase equipment.
The Chinese Ministry of Education, Chinese Academy of the Sciences, Indian
Institute of Science, and Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and School
of Computer Science are providing personnel and facilities, and participating
in collaborative research. Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is training
the scanning operators.
University of California, Merced, will be a mirror site for the Million Book
Collection. They have also contributed funds and personnel for copyright permissions
work.
Brewster Kahle
(Internet Archive) is providing disk storage.
OCLC is providing project partners with metadata at no charge, will support
a registry to track progress and avoid duplicate scanning, and might become
a sustaining host of the final Million Book Project collection.
Additional grant proposals are planned to support seeking copyright permissions,
further collection development, the management of project logistics, and shipping
costs. top
Can
users of the Million Book Collection print or download the books?
The delivery
systems for the Million Book Collection might restrict Print and Save functionality
to one-page at a time. netLibrary’s experience indicates that this is sufficient
deterrent to prevent users from printing or downloading entire books. This
restricted functionality is required for copyrighted books in the Collection.
(Note that copyrighted books are included in the Collection only with the
permission of the copyright holder.)
To Print or Save a displayed page, move the mouse over the page image. A little
toolbar will appear, with icons that enable users to Print, Save, and Email
the page. Just click on the appropriate icon to Print, Save, or Email the
page.
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Will
the Million Book Project preserve the fixed format of the initial publications?
Yes, the digitized
works will preserve the fixed format of the initial publications. top
What
metadata is being captured about the digitized works?
MARC records
and administrative metadata are being captured following existing standards.
Dublin Core is being used for materials that have not previously been catalogued
or where MARC is inappropriate, for example, for photographs and three-dimensional
cultural artifacts. top
Publishers
might not give the MBP blanket permission to digitize and make available all
of their out-of-print, in-copyright titles, but might entertain requests for
permission to digitize specific titles. Is that possible?
The MBP approach
is to request permission for a range of years, for example, everything published
prior to 1990. A publisher could specify the cut-off year or, alternatively,
specify the list of titles for which they grant non-exclusive permission to
digitize in the MBP. top
What
value-added services will the MBP develop and what formula will be used to calculate
publisher royalties? When might participating publishers begin to see income
from the project?
The MBP is not
developing a for-profit system. All of the content will be available free-to-read
on the Internet. Participating publishers will get copies of the digitized
books and metadata, and can themselves provide or enable others to provide
value-added services to access the digital books. Permission granted to the
MBP is NON-exclusive.
Reading the case study of the National Academy Press's experience putting
their books online free-to-read could facilitate understanding and appreciation
of the benefits of this approach. See: Barbara Kline Pope, "How to Succeed
in Online Markets: National Academy Press: A Case Study," Journal
of Electronic Publishing 4, 4 (May 1999). Available: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/pope.html
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What
kind of accuracy will the MBP achieve in scanning?
Carnegie Mellon
has established a workflow (based on pilot, 100-book and 1000-book projects)
that includes steps to insure capture of high resolution images and essential
metadata, post-processing to correct skewing and crop dark borders surrounding
the page images, and OCRing to create searchable ASCII text with 98% accuracy.
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Will
the TIFFs meet the Print-On-Demand (POD) standards of Replica and Lightning
Source?
The MBP follows
the standards and best practices supported in "A Framework of Guidance
for Building Good Digital Collections" Developed by the Institute for
Museum and Library Services in 2001 and endorsed by the Digital Library Federation
in 2002. See:
http://www.diglib.org/standards/imlsframe.htm
http://www.imls.gov/pubs/forumframework.htm
More specifically,
our guidelines for data production (excerpted from the MBP NSF proposal and
based on pilot projects) are:
- Bitonal images
with a pixel depth of 1 bit-per-pixel scanned at a resolution of 600 dots
per inch (DPI). Images will be stored as "Intel" TIFF (Tagged
Image File Format) files with the header content specified. The compression
algorithm used is ITU (Formerly CCITT) Group 4.
- TIFF version
5.0 is acceptable. Subject to testing, version 6.0 (or later) may also be
acceptable.
- The initial-capture
system includes dynamic thresholding or a similar feature to capture variability
of darkness in the imprint and possibly darker (e.g., foxed) backgrounds
from decay. Images should be as readable as the original pages.
- Typical expected
data will be provided for most TIFF tags (normally, the data supplied by
software default settings). A specification for the TIFF header will be
produced to include scanner technical information, filename, and other data,
but to be in no way a burden on the production service.
- Images will
be written in sequential order, with corresponding 8.3 filenames, e.g.,
00000001.tif as the first image in volume sequence and 00000341.tif as 341st
image in volume sequence.
- Volumes provided
to the MBP will be assigned unique identifiers that conform to 8.3 format.
The images will be in directories named with the corresponding identifier
(e.g., the volume identified as akf3435.001 will have a directory with the
same name, and 00000001.tif through 0000000N.tif files within that directory).
- Images and
directories (as specified above) will be written to gold CD-ROM according
to agreed upon specifications and using ISO9660 format.
- Skew will
be within a specified range of degrees allowed.
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Once
you've scanned a title, how soon will you return TIFFs to the publisher?
The timing depends
on many factors, including how long it takes us to locate copies of the books
for which permission was granted, how many books are involved, what's already
in the queue of books waiting to be scanned, etc. top
Who
will determine the pricing of value-added components of the MBP?
The publishers
or vendors who develop the value-added components will determine the pricing
for the services they provide. top
Comments
April 28, 2005 -- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html
Denise Troll, Associate Dean of University Libraries, troll@andrew.cmu.edu
© 2005 Carnegie Mellon Libraries
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