Scribes of the Digital Era

Brewster Kahle is mobilizing an army of Internet-era scribes who are fastidiously copying books page by page. Unlike the monks who slowly copied ancient tomes by hand, though, these scribes make digital reproductions, and they zip through hundreds of pages each hour.

Mr. Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is guiding a mass-digitization project called the Open Content Alliance, which was announced in October and is rapidly gaining partners. The alliance plans to take carefully selected collections of out-of-copyright books from libraries around the world and turn them into e-books that will be available free to scholars and anyone else who wants to view them, print them, or even download them to their own computers.

Many of the libraries involved in the project have only recently joined and are still deciding what materials they will contribute.

"Every library has some of those things that no one else has," says Shirley K. Baker, vice chancellor for information technology and dean of university libraries at Washington University in St. Louis, which recently joined the alliance. "We have probably a couple thousand books that are in the public domain that we could digitize and make publicly available."

Ms. Baker is also interested in digitizing films from the university's collection to add to the shared online library, including raw footage from Eyes on the Prize, a well-known documentary on the history of the civil-rights movement in the U.S. The book-scanning machines won't be necessary for that, of course, but the Internet Archive has experience digitizing and storing video and audio files as well, and the archive plans to collect a range of materials through the Open Content Alliance.

"Within this calendar year, we hope to be contributing at a relatively modest rate, but ramping up over the long run," says Ms. Baker.

•	Scribes of the Digital Era A library-scanning project brings public-domain materials online and offers an alternative to Google's model Chronicle of Higher Education, Friday, Jan. 27, 2006 Byline: Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education