The Digital Blog

As I write this – and probably as you read it – six sophisticated machines and their operators are hard at work in a corner of the British Library (BL). These machines are busy turning hundreds of pages of old books into digital files every hour.

The BL’s digitisation of 19th century books is one of many digitisation projects around the world that have been funded by Microsoft. The software giant was originally loading the digitised books onto its Live Search platform and about 40,000 British Library items were available on this site before Microsoft pulled its book project at the end of May.

The Live Search Books programme, which also included libraries such as those at the University of California, the University of Toronto, the New York Public Library, the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine and Cornell University, digitised 750,000 out-of-copyright books to put on the platform. However, Microsoft said that it now believes that the best way for a search engine to make book content available is by crawling content repositories created by publishers and libraries.

The end of Live Search Books does not mean an immediate end to the projects it was funding, however. For the British Library, the Microsoft funding covers 20 million pages which is approx 80,000 to 100,000 books, a target that the library anticipates reaching by the end of the year, subject to production variables. And Microsoft is encouraging its partners to keep their own digitised copies and carry on their projects. ‘We are removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitised library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitisation partners and libraries to continue digitisation programmes,’ said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vicepresident for search, portal and advertising when the Microsoft decision was announced.

Making whole collections electronic

The 19th century book project is not the British Library’s first digitisation initiative or its only one – there are 15 such projects going on currently. However, the speed and sheer number of titles being digitised are far greater than past initiatives and this is changing the process of picking which books to digitise.

‘One of the big challenges with digitisation is title selection,’ said Neil Fitzgerald, book digitisation project delivery manager for the British Library. ‘Mass digitisation allows us to deal with historical biases by digitising a whole collection.’

The six machines in the BL, which were provided by Kirtas Technologies, USA can each digitise up to 2,400 pages per hour, although Fitzgerald said that 1,200 pages per hour is more realistic for old and fragile books such as many in the BL’s collections. These machines are being put to work 16 hours per day by digitisation partner, Content Conversion Specialists (CCS) of Germany. ‘The original target was to digitise about one million pages per month but it will soon be two million pages per month,’ commented Fitzgerald. This project was piloted last year and full production began in late October/early November 2007. The pilot was essential in deciding the workflow. According to Fitzgerald, the book scanning itself posed fewer challenges than other parts of the process. ‘The actual digitisation is relatively easy. The robotics are new, but we have been digitising materials for 20 years,’ he explained. ‘New approaches are needed, however, to cope with volumes.’

more