[At the U. of Illinois] Over 23,000 books have already been digitized through the library’s contract with the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library.
The library is digitizing books mainly because “we want to make primary source material more accessible to scholars and we also want to make sure people can find them and use them more efficiently,” said Beth Sandore, associate university librarian for information technology.
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In addition to the University’s work with the Internet Archive, the University is also part of a consortium of Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), which has partnered with Google in efforts to digitize collections that will be available through Google Books.
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All items being digitized by the University Library, the Internet Archive and the Google Books Library Project will be deposited in HathiTrust, a shared digital repository for the nation’s research libraries.
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On average, about 500 pages per hour are scanned using two scribe book scanner machines owned by the Internet Archive, which equates to about 15 to 20 volumes being digitized per day.
The article also discusses the digitization of U.S. government documents and local newspapers.