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Carnegie Mellon's Digital Library Exceeds 1.5 Million Books
cashman73 writes "Most Slashdot readers are probably familiar with Google's book scanning project, a collaboration with several major universities to digitize works of literature, art, and science. But Google may have been beat to the punch this time -- about a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project to scan books into digital format, to be made available online. Today, according to new reports, they now have a collection of 1.5 million books, the equivalent of a typical university library, available online."
http://tera-3.ul.cs.cmu.edu/
Towards the Singularity.
This site (which is found at ulib.org BTW) seems to have a pretty good collection of obvious titles to choose from, though having to download a custom plug-in to read anything is a bit annoying (and apparently temporary). I played around for a while, seeing what I could dig up, and didn't see any obvious gaps (though I purposely avoided anything modern).
As an author, I was always a bit worried having Google as the sole gatekeeper for this kind of service... not that I necessarily distrust Google's intentions, but if they changed their worldview one day, it'd be a pity to have so much work invested in only one place, and have to re-build it all somewhere else. It's nice that there are proper choices, and not all from a commercial stance either.
I don't know how smooth the integration process is (I submitted one of my books, but it appears it's a very un-automated system involving email etc, so it will probably take a while to see results). But still, I'm glad they're giving authors a way to help grow the library. Here's hoping it becomes even better than its promise!
The world's only surviving livewriter.
For those that missed the articles about C.M.'s associated project for validating all those scanned words on all those scanned pages: http://recaptcha.net/
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.
I picked a book at random, Dickens' tale of 2 cities. Here's the first few lines:
"TIT was the best of tunes, it was the worst of times,..."
"li was tie winter of despair, we had everything before us,..."
I guess they just OCR'd books en-masse without proof reading. Oh well, think of it as an exercise for your brain.
Already been done. Check this site: http://www.teach12.com/store/courses.asp?t=&sl=&s=905&sbj=Literature%20and%20English%20Language&fMode=s I've listened to some of their recordings and they were pretty good.
Sure, most of the digitization was done in China... but the vast majority of the books on the site are Chinese, too. Of the 1.5 million books in the collection, almost 1 million of them are Chinese. English accounts for most of the rest at 362508 books.
1.5 million books? Ok, maybe my tastes are a bit more focussed on mathematics, physics, programming, economics, and linguistics than would be the CMU library, but I just burned 3 DVDs worth of math books alone, 12GB of PDF, at roughly 8MB/title, for 1500 titles. And that was just one week's worth of crap filtering for one man. Methinks CMU isn't really trying.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-