Turning books into bits

Michael Rogers Columnist • Profile • E-mail

Several years ago journalist John Lenger told a remarkable story in the Columbia Journalism Review about teaching a journalism class at Harvard’s extension school. He asked his young students to write a story about a Harvard land deal that occurred in 1732, but after a week of research, most came back with almost nothing substantial to report. The problem: They had done most of their research using the Internet, walking right past Harvard’s library and archives, where the actual information could be found. When Lenger questioned their research methods, one student replied that she assumed that anything that was important in the world was already on the Internet.

When I told that story recently to Brewster Kahle, the founder of the San Francisco non-profit Internet Archive , he shook his head: “When we were growing up,” he said, “we had great libraries. But for kids today, the Internet is their library.  We are giving them an instantly accessible resource that is much worse than what we grew up with.”  But Kahle, along with Google , Amazon and a clutch of prestigious libraries worldwide are all working to change that: digitizing thousands of books every day, building a global library where every manner of content lives online. 

Turning books into bits, however, is not easy: each page must be scanned individually. Until recently, that was a slow and labor-intensive process — often outsourced to countries like the Philippines or India. Now, however, several companies are producing book-scanning robots.  One Swiss model, now in use at Stanford, can scan more than 1,000 pages an hour, turning the pages with delicate puffs of air; it costs, however, north of a half million dollars. An American version, from Kirtas Technologies, is less costly at $100,000 to $150,000; the Rochester Public Library in New York recently became its first customer. And at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, Kahle and company are bolting together an even cheaper scanning system — dubbed “Scribes” — that will travel to libraries around the country. Even with all this technology, however, the digitizing will take years and enormous amounts of money. Stanford recently pegged the cost of digitizing its 8 million volume library at a quarter of a billion dollars.

Some might consider turning real books into ephemeral data a step backward in terms of preserving the world’s knowledge, but in fact it’s just the opposite: Physical libraries aren’t necessarily dependable repositories of information. That starts with the great Library of Alexandria, founded around the third century BC. The library was said to include hundreds of thousands of scrolls — even Aristotle’s personal collection — but it was destroyed sometime early in the first millennium of the common era, wiping away forever most of humankind’s first writings. It was no accident that when Egypt opened a new Library of Alexandria in 2003, the institution promptly dedicated itself to digitizing 15,000 Arabic books annually, as well as participating in the Carnegie Mellon Million Books digitization project that will share digital collections worldwide. “Governments burn libraries,” says Kahle, “societies go up and down, Iron Curtains go up and down. Having copies in multiple places is the best way to preserve knowledge.” 

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