In addition to access to 20,000 scholarly journals, the Penn libraries are now aiming to make 200,000 out-of-print books available as well.
Through a partnership with Kirtas Technologies, students, faculty and the general public will be able to purchase digitized copies of these books by way of Kirtas' new digitize-on-demand project.
A customer can either purchase a digital edition - readable on the computer - or a print copy, which comes in paperback or cloth cover, said Joseph Zucca, director for Planning and Communication at the Penn libraries. The digital edition will be searchable online using character recognition optical technology, which converts page images into an encoding readable by a machine.
The project is offering books that are hard to find because they are "out of print and in the public domain, meaning that they were published before 1923," he explained. "So, there is no copyright conflict about any of this material."
Because similarities to other digitization projects are often brought up, Zucca emphasized that the distinctive points were the quality of the scans, in addition to the ability to own the books.
"There has been a general complaint about the quality of Google's scanned images and texts," David McKnight of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library said. "But their original goal is not to produce a high-quality facsimile [but rather] texts they can index."
To produce such "facsimiles," Kirtas uses innovative "automatic page-turning scanner" technology.
Deanna Vincent from Kirtas described the scanning process: The book is held and shifted in a cradle, kept at a certain angle to reduce stress on the spine of the book, with pages turned by a vacuum.
"Other services just chop off the spine of the book and feed the pages into a scanner," she said. "We keep the book intact, which is especially important for rare, old books you don't want to de-spine."
Zucca also stressed the important "on-demand" aspect of the partnership.
"This has a built-in selection process, where if somebody in the market has expressed an interest in [a book], that's a good operative definition for scanning eligibility," he said.
This partnership is one of three recent undertakings by Kirtas. Other participants include Cornell University and the Rochester Institute of Technology, McKnight said.
Vincent added that, in total, there have been about 12 partnerships with universities and public libraries.
"There is a lot of energy and activity in this whole area of digitization," Zucca said, referring to other projects by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the Sloan Foundation and the Open Content Alliance, all of which are trying to digitize texts.
Though there has not been a particular faculty or student demand for these specific texts, Zucca said he hopes "the availability of it will begin to surprise people with interest."
