Scribe to Advance Digitization at UNC Library

Nov. 13 - The first "Scribe" in the Southeast arrived Nov. 7 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, thanks to a recent agreement between the Library and the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

"Scribe," a high-speed scanner and software application developed by the Internet Archive, will speed the conversion of books to digital format and encourage experimentation with the free delivery of digitized material via the Internet.

According to Robert Miller, director of books at the Internet Archive, approximately fifty Scribe machines are currently deployed around the country, capable of digitizing more than 300,000 books per year. Unlike Google's much- publicized book-scanning project, all materials scanned in partnership with the Internet Archive are freely available on the Web.

"Even a single Scribe can make possible opportunities we haven't yet imagined," said Miller.

Kirill Fesenko, head of the Carolina Digital Library at UNC, said that Scribe will help UNC develop capacity for high-speed digitization of library collections and will catalyze collaborative experimentation. The Renaissance Computing Institute, with offices on six university campuses in North Carolina including UNC Chapel Hill, has already signed on as a partner with the Library to explore the delivery and use of digital texts for research and education.

UNC will initially turn Scribe to the digitization of large and heavily consulted collections. Under review for the pilot phase are approximately 22,000 Spanish-language dramas from the 18th through the early-20th centuries; 1,200 American and British travel accounts published between 1782 and 1920; a century of back issues of UNC's yearbook, "Yackety Yack;" and thousands of ephemeral items such as board minutes and church bulletins that document the lives of North Carolinians since the middle of the 18th century.

"These are large, fragile, and highly disparate collections," said Fesenko. "We expect to learn a great deal about the challenges of digitization on a mass scale."

The Internet Archive will provide a project manager and operator for one year. UNC librarians will select items for digitization and will work with Internet Archive personnel to experiment with technologies and workflows. Scanned materials will be freely available on the Archive's Web site and UNC will retain the digital files to enhance and distribute as it chooses.

A public rollout of the Scribe and a formal ribbon cutting for UNC's expanded digital library are planned for early in 2008.

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