Inside Bay Area - University working to put world's library online

Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog:

Scanning for the Future

In the eyes of most librarians and archivists, digitizing books is an important and timely task. Unfortunately, it is also a tedious one, as the Tri-Valley Herald points out.

The Herald stopped by the University of California's Northern Regional Library Facility and found about 12 young men and women [employees of San Francisco-based Internet Archive] each wearing headphones and "sitting under black tents that keep out extraneous light," quietly scanning page upon page. Building the library of the future is not a glamorous task, says Scott Miller, the facility's operations manager: "We kind of think of it as a 21st-century Industrial Revolution type of job."

Since the university partnered with Google last summer, the company has scanned about 130,000 UC volumes at its Mountain View headquarters. Every afternoon, a panel truck arrives at the Richmond site to drop off one load of books and pick up 3,000 more.