Penn’s libraries are busy making thousands of hard-to-find books and publications available online in a multifaceted effort intended to make rare literature more available to academics at Penn and around the world.
Of the University’s 5.7 million volumes, nearly 300,000 are rare books and manuscripts, only readable on campus or by short-term loan.
Joe Zucca, director for Planning and Communication for Penn Libraries, aims to change that.
“Demand is immediate,” he said. “Online access is invaluable for research purposes.”
In addition to several in-house projects, the University has engaged in partnerships with Kirtas Technologies, Lyrasis Mass Digitization and other groups.
Penn’s foremost digitization project, the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Imaging, was started in 1996 by a grant from ‘53 College alumnus Larry Schoenberg.
From its home in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, SCETI team members have digitized 80,000 graphics and sound files and over 200,000 pages of written material.
SCETI files, together with text and media from related projects, are downloaded as many as five million times per year.
The main problem with digitizing projects, according to SCETI curator David McKnight, is what to digitize.
SCETI team members favor old and hard-to-find works, with an eye for prioritizing based on demand.
SCETI’s headquarters on the fourth floor of Van Pelt consist of several large-format scanners, ultra-high-resolution digital cameras and a sophisticated imaging rig that photographs each page before turning it with vacuums and a robotic arm.
“It’s very time-consuming,” said McKnight, “but we’ve got the right tools and we’re looking to improve.”
SCETI is also working to archive every copy of the Daily Pennsylvanian over 125 years, a project that has received roughly $700,000 of funding and is slated to take three years.
Next on the menu are certain medieval texts and a collection of Penn dissertations.
“There’s still an enormous amount of material to be scanned,” said McKnight.
With funding from the Sloane Foundation, Penn has worked with library coalition Lyrasis to post thousands of materials on the Internet Archive, where they will be freely available. Penn Libraries is planning to make its Lyrasis-copied works accessible on its website.
“We’re not like Google Books … we’re not just scanning material and blasting it up to the Web,” Zucca said. “It’s a more surgical approach.”
Material scanned by SCETI is embedded with a significant amount of metadata, making it easier to find text and images — scanned captions are automatically tied to photos and text from cluttered newspaper advertisements is fully searchable.
Penn also partners with Kirtas Technologies, a company which provides on-demand digitization.
For $2, students and faculty can request a digital copy of any publication or manuscript from Kirtas’ New York office.
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