Issue date: 11/19/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Brian Shmerling Books rest on the shelves of Van Pelt Library. More and more libraries are uploading their entire collections onto the internet, but Penn is still evaluating the pros and cons of 'digitization.' [Click to enlarge]

Too lazy to make the trek to the library?

There may be a solution on the horizon.

Earlier this November, Yale University signed a contract with Microsoft to upload their entire library collection onto a search engine, which will allow students to access Yale's media and book collection­ anywhere, anytime.

Yale is just the latest school to digitize its library: Google, Microsoft and a conglomerate of several libraries called The Open Content Alliance have recently been asking libraries for the rights to upload their collections onto Internet servers. This would allow anyone with Internet access to view many of the resources online.

Harvard and Brown universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among institutions who have done the same.

For the moment, however, a digital library is not in Penn's future.

Penn Library's director of collection development and management Martha Brogan said the 'library-digitization' initiative is still "under evaluation."

"There have been a number of formal and informal conversations between Penn and various large-scale digitization projects," she said. "There are several different models and very different terms to the contracts that each of these vendors [are] offering."

She added that Penn is waiting to see what is best for Penn's library users, rather than settling for Google, Microsoft or OCA contracts.

She said digitization creates a "huge influx" of data that the library must manage, which requires increased infrastructure within a library like Van Pelt. The Library administration would have to consider whether or not to upload the entire collection or just parts of it.

"We are now benefiting from our colleagues that jumped into digitization at first," she said. "We are learning some of the problems that they are facing."

Continued...

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