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, LyrasisMass Digitization and other groups.
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SCETI [Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Imaging] 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.
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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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