This proposal requests funds for a "Million Book Project" partners research and coordination meeting. Begun in 2000, the Million Book Project has scanned over 1.6 million books in China, India, Egypt and Australia and made great strides in research areas relevant to large-scale, multi-lingual database storage and retrieval. Project partners intend to continue to work together on issues related to human computer interactions, usability, automatic metadata detection and correction using artificial intelligence, intellectual property, machine translation and summarization, improving and providing centralized access to metadata, long term data storage and access issues, diversity and education. Funding provided by the National Science Foundation has attracted international partners and matching funds exceeding $100 million U.S. dollars.
Award # 1038216 Million Book Project Partners Meeting Supplemental Grant for a Research and Coordination Meeting at Zhejiang University The transmission of cultural heritage through book culture has depended on limited numbers of printed copies of books in fragile media. The fires of Alexandria irrevocably severed our access to many of the works of the ancients. In a thousand years, only a few of the paper documents we have today will survive deterioration, loss, and outright destruction. With no more than 10 million unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 100 million since the beginning of recorded history, the task of preservation is much large. The National Science Foundation addressed these problems by funding Carnegie Mellon University's Million Book Project, in partnership with the Governments of China and India. The project was directed by Dr. Raj Reddy, Dr. Gloriana St. Clair, Dr. Michael Shamos, Dr. Jaime Carbonell, and Ram Konduru. As of 2010, the project had exceeded its goal, digitizing over two million volumes. More significantly, this project acted as a spark, inspiring many others to begin their own digitization and preservation projects, including Google and Microsoft. The grant provided by the NSF enabled Carnegie Mellon University representatives to retrospectively examine the progress made by the Million Book Project and identify future steps necessary to the success of our long term vision. The most significant point of interest was fortifying the digitization and preservation of intellectual material against the emergent digital distribution business model which favors short term gains over long term preservation. Going forward, groups working on digitization should consider forming a coalition for the standardization of archiving and permanence of digital content.
