The BA Participates in the Digitization of 1.5 Million Books as Part of the Million Book Project
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Alexandria—
As part of the Million Book Project, a joint venture involving universities and libraries in United States of America, China, India and the BA and led by Carnegie Mellon University, 1.5 million books have been digitized. The Project aims at digitizing one million non-copyrighted books and publish them as a searchable collection on the Internet. Digitized books are available now through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org).
The primary long-term objective of the Project is to transfer all books in all languages into digital format, in order to create a Universal Digital Library (UDL) to save the world heritage from destruction which occurred in the past, especially when the Ancient Library of Alexandria was destroyed.
The vast majority of scanning and digitization has been performed at centers in India and China. More recently, the Library of Alexandria, has joined the effort. Now, about 4,000 books are scanned daily by more than 1,000 workers. Following the digitization of the million book, the long term goal of the Universal Library is to include the content from all the media sources such as newspapers, speeches, music, paintings and videos to the collection , as agreed upon at the Third Annual International Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL), held at Carnegie Mellon, 2-4 November 2007.
It is worth mentioning that the BA is a pioneer in the digitization of books and heritage, and is a partner to the Library of Congress in the World Digital Library (WDL) Project, which aims to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness.