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Carnegie Mellon's Digital Library Exceeds 1.5 Million Books

Posted by Zonk on from the might-just-be-enough-to-read dept.

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."

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Link here by autophile · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://tera-3.ul.cs.cmu.edu/

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    Towards the Singularity.
    1. Re:Link here by Rebelgecko · · Score: 4, Informative
      If you're looking for the Mac or Linux versions of the plugin, try rereading the part of the page that says

      To see the book pages of ULIB, please dowload free TIFF plugin or DjVu plugin
      Then try following the link to the DjVu plugin and downloading the Windows, Mac or Unix one, depending on your what you need. They're available here.
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      CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
  2. Nice to have alternatives by MrAndrews · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

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    The world's only surviving livewriter.
  3. Guess they couldn't afford proof readers. by liftphreaker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.