OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW?

The Mass Digitalisation of Books

Google was the first to bring up library digitalisation projects into the public eye, after having announced its aim to digitally mass bound volumes of what we once knew as books into digital formats.

Now, mass digitalisation is very much the act of converting physical materials on an industrial degree. The mass digitalisation is carried out by photographing of books, page by page. As you perhaps can imagine, human interaction is highly limited as the layout, text, page numbers, table of contents are all automatically detected by the optical character recognition software.

Google is a company of high ambition, and intend to convert every single book present in five major US libraries. As of now, Google has provided the search service Google Books which provides a snippet of the searched books. However, with the anticipated high-volume scanning processes, Professor John Price Wilkin of University of Michigan, has estimated that scanning 7 million books in Michigan’s library would be concluded and finalised within the short term of 6 years. With the speed of mass digitalisation, will libraries suffer and ultimately be threatened by complete extinction?

During the conversion process, companies will realise that some items are too frail to undergo the process of mass digitalisation, and perhaps items which are deemed unsuitable due to size and some books might include folded maps etc. which would need special attention. As much as digitalising every book ever written sounds rather convenient, it definitely puts libraries at risk as well as people who do not have broadband access.

Libraries play an essential and crucial role in providing access to all sorts of information whether it would be internet or physical material. Therefore, it is safe to say that libraries are not declining in importance. Libraries mend the worlds of information rich and information poor. Shifting everything online would highly incapacitate our society as we know it. As mentioned before, it is greatly ignorant to assume that everyone has internet access. And even if everyone did, not every single user would be aware of how to utilise the internet to its fullest potential.

Therefore, libraries are still needed in today’s digital age. Let the “old” stay.

Written by Emilie Rytter Dahl