Major Digitization Program Announced: NYU Announces Plans to Digitize All Holdings of Bobst Library
UPDATE: 10/21: Library Journal reports that the article in the Washington Square News the other day, that's to linked to below is inaccurate.
Josh Taylor, senior director, communications, NYU Abu Dhabi responds to what he told and is quoted saying in the article. He notes the conversation with the reporter was done using e-mail. Taylor's comments appear on a Chronicle of Higher Education weblog).
This is a case of a reporter being 100-percent accurate with a quote, but drawing a wholly different conclusion than what she was actually told (or in this case, e-mailed).
The final part of my quote [in the article below] is critical to understanding our long-term thinking on the subject. Digitizing for digitization’s sake isn’t a sound academic or economic strategy. However, digitizing as we identify specific curricular and research needs that would benefit from students and faculty being able to access materials in a city other than their own is an essential component of NYU’s vision for the global network university.
NYU Library dean Carol Mandel today told LJ that “our plan, pending more approvals, is to do some significant selected appropriate digitization projects." She goes on to tell Library Journal that the number one priority of a digitization project is that they meet "curricular and research needs." Mandel also lists other factors that include, not digitizing content that has been digitized elsewhere, accessibility issues, and having permissions in order.
While Mandel was not ready to discuss the size or cost of the project, she said that it was not, as implied in the article, mass digitization but rather “more akin to digital collection development.” Small projects, she said, could begin this year or next.
With the financial backing of Abu Dhabi, NYU is planning to digitize Bobst Library.
This will be perhaps NYU Abu Dhabi's most visible change for the university's Washington Square campus. A digital database of all the holdings in Bobst would serve to connect Abu Dhabi and New York's research materials.
[Snip]
"We do plan on the future digitization of materials at Bobst, for access by those in Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere in the global network university, as curricular and research needs demand it," NYUAD spokesman Josh Taylor wrote in an e-mail.
[Snip]
No other university has a completely digitized library, though many universities have made partial steps toward digitization, usually beginning with rare collections.
Kirtas Technologies, a leading company in digitization services, has worked to digitize portions of libraries at Yale and Cornell universities and at the University of Pennsylvania.
While working on a Microsoft-funded project at Yale and Cornell, Kirtas was digitizing three million pages a month — to the tune of 10 or 12 cents per page, according to Marketing Operations Manager Todd Whiting. That adds up to approximately $3 to $4 million a year.
NYU currently has no time frame for when the project will start. The university's libraries have a combined 5.1 million volumes.
[Snip]
The large-scale digitization projects at Yale and Cornell did encounter some hiccups. According to Whiting, Kirtas had to develop a completely new machine to digitize the pull-out maps and diagrams in many of the rare books at the two universities.
The WSN Editorial Board thinks the benefits of a digitized library are innumerable. Access to all Bobst stacks though an online, searchable database will help all students and faculty, and the project shows that NYU is on the forefront of embracing technology in academia.
However, some members of our board feel a sense of uneasiness over the project's funding. The Abu Dhabi government will cover 100 percent of the costs in digitizing Bobst, just as it has covered all costs in building NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi.
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