This proposal requests funds for a "Million Book Project" partners research and coordination meeting to be held on November 6-9, 2009, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.. The Million Book Project was begun in 2000, aiming to be the most ambitious mass digitization project ever undertaken. The initial goal was to digitize and provide free-to-read access to one million books by 2007. Today the Million Book Project, the Google Book Search Project and others continue to bring new materials to the web. It is estimated that about 10 million books are now available on the web through these different projects. Vast and increasing amounts of physical textual content previously constrained in use due to location and access issues is now available to all via the internet worldwide. To date the Project has scanned over 1.5 million books in China, India and Egypt. In the process it continues add knowledge, stimulate new research in areas of large-scale, multi-lingual database storage, retrieval and presentation of results. This meeting will continue and renew the those processes of communication, planning, interaction and coordination necessary to ensure international collaborationKey topics to be explored include machine translation and summarization, intellectual property and rights management issues, improving and providing centralized access to the metadata, usability issues, growing the collection, diversity, dissemination, education and others.
