Million Book Project
Encyclopedia
The Million Book Project (or the Universal Library), is a book digitization project, led by Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 School of Computer Science and University Libraries. Working with government and research partners in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 (Digital Library of India
Digital Library of India
Digital Library of India, part of the online services of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and partner in the Million Book Project, provides free access to many books in English and Indian languages. The scanning of Indian language books has created an opportunity for developing Indian...

) and China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

, the project is scanning books in many languages, using OCR
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web. As of 2007, they have completed the scanning of 1 million books and have made accessible the entire database from http://www.ulib.org.

Description

Twenty-two scanning centers are operating in India, including four mega-centers. Eighteen centers are running in China, including a mega-center in a free-trade zone
Free trade zone
A free trade zone or export processing zone , also called foreign-trade zone, formerly free port is an area within which goods may be landed, handled, manufactured or reconfigured, and reexported without the intervention of the customs authorities...

 to avoid customs delays with shipments of books from the United States. Materials are also being scanned in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

, Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...

, and Carnegie Mellon.

By December 2007 more than 1.5 million books had been scanned, in 20 languages: 970,000 in Chinese; 360,000 in English; 50,000 in Telugu
Telugu language
Telugu is a Central Dravidian language primarily spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where it is an official language. It is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu...

; and 40,000 in Arabic. Most of the books are in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, but permission has been acquired to include over 60,000 copyrighted books (roughly 53,000 in English and 7,000 in Indian languages). The books are mirrored in part at sites in India, China, Carnegie Mellon, the Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...

, Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina or Maktabat al-Iskandarīyah is a major library and cultural center located on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea in the Egyptian city of Alexandria...

. The books that have been scanned to date are not yet all available online, and no single site has copies of all the books that are available online.

The million book project will provide a wide array of content, but one of its collection strengths will be agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...

. In partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
Food and Agriculture Organization
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is a specialised agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Serving both developed and developing countries, FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and...

, the United States National Agricultural Library
United States National Agricultural Library
The United States National Agricultural Library is one of the world's largest agricultural research libraries, and serves as a National Library of the United States and as the library of the United States Department of Agriculture...

, and university libraries with quality agriculture collections, the project is digitizing materials and developing plans for a knowledge network to improve rural community access to critical agricultural information.

Significant research is underway in the project, including OCR for Indian and Arabic languages and scripts. The research also includes developments in machine translation
Machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

, automatic summarization
Automatic summarization
Automatic summarization is the creation of a shortened version of a text by a computer program. The product of this procedure still contains the most important points of the original text....

, image processing
Image processing
In electrical engineering and computer science, image processing is any form of signal processing for which the input is an image, such as a photograph or video frame; the output of image processing may be either an image or, a set of characteristics or parameters related to the image...

, large-scale database management, user interface design, and strategies for acquiring copyright permission at an affordable cost. Indian partners have developed a translating and transliterating user interface. Partners in Egypt are developing an interface that supports annotation
Annotation
An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...

 and highlighting. Partners in China have made remarkable progress on content-based image retrieval and machine analysis of calligraphic scripts. Carnegie Mellon has taken strides in machine translation and automatic summarization.

The National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 (NSF) awarded Carnegie Mellon $3.63M over four years for equipment and administrative travel for the Million Book Project. India is providing $25M annually to support language translation research projects. The Ministry of Education in China is providing $8.46M over three years. The Internet Archive has provided equipment, staff and money. The University of California Libraries
University of California Libraries
The University of California operates the largest academic library system in the world. It manages more than 34 million items in 100 libraries on ten campuses. The purpose of these libraries is to assist research and instruction on the University of California campuses...

 at Merced
Merced, California
Merced is a city in, and the county seat of, Merced County, California in the San Joaquin Valley of Northern California. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 78,958. Incorporated in 1889, Merced is a charter city that operates under a council-manager government...

 funded the work to acquire copyright permission from U.S. publishers.

India, China, and the USA agreed in November 2005 to join the Open Content Alliance
Open Content Alliance
The Open Content Alliance is a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California, the University of Toronto and others...

 (OCA), initiated by Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian.- Biography :Kahle graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The...

 and the Internet Archive, because the goals of the OCA are consistent with those of the Million Book Project and the Universal Digital Library.

China

The institutions in China which are participants in this project include:
  • Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China
    Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China
    The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China , formerly Ministry of Education, Central People's Government from 1949 to 1954, State Education Commission from 1985 to 1998, is headquartered in Beijing. It is the agency of the State Council which regulates all aspects of the...

  • Chinese Academy of Science
  • Fudan University
    Fudan University
    Fudan University , located in Shanghai, is one of the oldest and most selective universities in China, and is a member of the C9 League. Its institutional predecessor was founded in 1905, shortly before the end of China's imperial Qing dynasty...

  • Nanjing University
    Nanjing University
    Nanjing University , or Nanking University, is one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher learning in China...

  • Peking University
    Peking University
    Peking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...

  • Tsinghua University
    Tsinghua University
    Tsinghua University , colloquially known in Chinese as Qinghua, is a university in Beijing, China. The school is one of the nine universities of the C9 League. It was established in 1911 under the name "Tsinghua Xuetang" or "Tsinghua College" and was renamed the "Tsinghua School" one year later...

  • Zhejiang University
    Zhejiang University
    Zhejiang University , sometimes referred to as Zheda, is a national university in China. Founded in 1897, Zhejiang University is one of China's oldest institutions of higher education...

  • North-East Normal University

India

The institutions in India which are participants in this project include:
  • Indian Institute of Science
    Indian Institute of Science
    Indian Institute of Science is a research institution of higher learning located in Bangalore, India. It was established in 1909.-History:After a chance meeting between Jamsetji N...

    , Bangalore
    Bangalore
    Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...

  • International Institute of Information Technology
    International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
    International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad is an autonomous university in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India. It was established in 1998 with seed support from the Government of Andhra Pradesh...

    , Hyderabad
  • Indian Institute of Information Technology
    Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad
    The Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad is an Indian Institute of Information Technology established in 1999 by the government of India. The institute was conferred deemed university status in 2000, empowering it to award degrees following the setting of its own examinations...

    , Allahabad
    Allahabad
    Allahabad , or Settled by God in Persian, is a major city of India and is one of the main holy cities of Hinduism. It was renamed by the Mughals from the ancient name of Prayaga , and is by some accounts the second-oldest city in India. It is located in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh,...

  • Anna University
    Anna University
    Anna University was a premier technical university in Tamil Nadu, India. Anna University was formed on September 4, 1978, as a unitary university that integrated four technical institutions in the city of Chennai , including the College of Engineering, Guindy, Alagappa College of Technology,...

    , Chennai
    Chennai
    Chennai , formerly known as Madras or Madarasapatinam , is the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, located on the Coromandel Coast off the Bay of Bengal. Chennai is the fourth most populous metropolitan area and the sixth most populous city in India...

  • Mysore University, Mysore
  • University of Pune
    University of Pune
    The University of Pune , is a university located in northwestern Pune, India. It was founded in 1949. Spread over a campus, the university is home to 46 academic departments...

    , Pune
    Pune
    Pune , is the eighth largest metropolis in India, the second largest in the state of Maharashtra after Mumbai, and the largest city in the Western Ghats. Once the centre of power of the Maratha Empire, it is situated 560 metres above sea level on the Deccan plateau at the confluence of the Mula ...

  • Goa University
    Goa University
    Goa University was established in 1985 and merged with the Centre for Post Graduate Instruction and Research of the University of Bombay that functioned at state-capital Panaji or Panjim. Goa University offers both graduate and post-graduate studies and research programmes...

    , Goa
    Goa
    Goa , a former Portuguese colony, is India's smallest state by area and the fourth smallest by population. Located in South West India in the region known as the Konkan, it is bounded by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and by Karnataka to the east and south, while the Arabian Sea forms its...

  • Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams
    Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams
    Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams also referred as TTD is an independent trust which manages the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple at Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh...

    , Tirupathi
  • Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy
    Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy
    The Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy, known as SASTRA University, is a deemed university in the town of Thirumalaisamudram, Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, India. Undergraduate and postgraduate engineering courses are its focus....

    , Tanjore
  • Arulmigu Kalasalingam College of Engineering, Srivilliputhur
    Srivilliputhur
    Srivilliputhur is a semi-urban town and a municipality in Virudhunagar district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu....

  • Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation
    Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation
    Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation is a project of the Government of Maharashta State in India, and is the leading corporation of Maharashtra....

    , Mumbai
    Mumbai
    Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...


USA

The institutions in the U.S. which are participants include:
  • Indiana University
    Indiana University
    Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

  • Pennsylvania State University
    Pennsylvania State University
    The Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State or PSU, is a public research university with campuses and facilities throughout the state of Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855, the university has a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service...

  • Stanford University
    Stanford University
    The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

  • TriColleges (Swarthmore
    Swarthmore College
    Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

    , Haverford
    Haverford College
    Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...

    , Bryn Mawr
    Bryn Mawr College
    Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....

    )
  • University of California, Berkeley
    University of California, Berkeley
    The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

  • University of California, Merced
    University of California, Merced
    The University of California, Merced, commonly referred to as UC Merced or UCM, is the tenth and newest of the University of California campuses. Located in the San Joaquin Valley in unincorporated Merced County, California, near Merced, UC Merced was the first American research university to...

  • University of Pittsburgh
    University of Pittsburgh
    The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

  • University of Washington
    University of Washington
    University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...


See also

  • Digital library
    Digital library
    A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...

  • List of digital library projects
  • Digital preservation
    Digital preservation
    Digital preservation is the set of processes, activities and management of digital information over time to ensure its long term accessibility. The goal of digital preservation is to preserve materials resulting from digital reformatting, and particularly information that is born-digital with no...

  • Repository (publishing)
    Repository (publishing)
    A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing,is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles....

  • Universal library
    Universal library
    A universal library is a library with universal collections. This may be expressed in terms of it containing all existing information, useful information, all books, all works or even all possible works. This ideal, although unrealizable, has influenced and continues to influence librarians and...

  • Book scanning
    Book scanning
    Book scanning is the process of converting physical books and magazines into digital media such as images, electronic text, or electronic books by using an image scanner....


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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