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, I’m unclear if this marks the millionth book digitized via their Google Book Search partnership, or if this is a combination of their in-house digitization projects plus their Google Book Search efforts … anybody out there know? And is this their millionth digitized book that’s available in the public domain or just their millionth digitized book? There’s a big difference in this milestone, depending!
What’s really cool is that the Michigan Digitization Project celebrates the hard-working staff who made this milestone possible. When I see their numbers (436 contributing staff members) and think of our current staffing levels (take that number, divide by 100, add FTE) of … well, we’ve got a way to go to 1,000,000.
But what’s SUPER COOL is the Details of Digitization photo set. Did anyone subscribe to National Geographic World (the youth version of National Geographic magazine) when they were growing up? The back of the magazine was my favorite part, with close-up photos where you were to figure out “What in the World...?” This great photo set has beautiful closeups of broken books, conserved books, in-process books, and the equipment, tools, and supplies used in conservation.
February 7, 2008 at 8:06 pm
It’s the combination of both workflows (as illustrated in the flowchart) loaded into MBooks.
February 8, 2008 at 5:44 am
I also thought they were wonderful pictures, but I was also intrigued to see that while the celebration is for this grand 21st century digital project, most of the the pictures celebrate the book as a physical artifact as well as the physical craft of conserving them. I realize that old books tend to be more photogenic and appeal more to our emotions than servers and scanners, but it still seems a curious way to promote this project. The other thought I had was, “I wonder how much extra work this has created for their conservation department?”
February 8, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’m so glad you like my photos! If you want more – : go here.