Carla DeMello

To digitize books that are in the public domain, Cornell library staff must select books and ship them to Kirtas Technologies for scanning. Here, library public services assistants Wendy Thompson, left, reads out the call numbers of books selected for digitization, Ken Tiddick, right, pulls the books from the shelves, and Paw Pha loads the pulled volumes onto the book transport cart.

Cornell University Library (CUL) has signed a partnership with Microsoft Corp. that will add public domain books to its online collections, making "checking out" books even easier.

Under the agreement, many of CUL's English-language collection in the public domain -- up to 300,000 books -- and other published materials will be digitized, making them freely available on the Web.

Materials in the public domain are those that either were never copyrighted or whose copyright has expired. They include all books published prior to 1923.

Anyone with Internet access will be able to locate these materials online using most Internet search engines and view them at CUL's Web site or Microsoft's Live Book Search, a search service for book content.

"When surveyed about their needs, CUL's users rate access to full text online as one of their highest priorities, so this partnership will enable us to respond to student and faculty expectations," said Sarah E. Thomas, Cornell's Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "We are just beginning to experience the transformative effects of ready access to the cultural record of our civilization. The years ahead will be exciting for us all."

Microsoft has contracted with Kirtas Technologies in Victor, N.Y., to scan the materials using the world's fastest robotic scanners, which can process up to 2,400 pages per hour -- or about 8 minutes per book.

"We are happy to be working with Kirtas Technologies on this very important initiative for the university," said Cornell President David Skorton, who has made increasing the impact of the university beyond campus boundaries one of his goals. "They are a very good choice for this endeavor because of the quality of their work and the opportunity to showcase New York state talent."

Cornell plans to start the project this week, shipping out some 5,000 books and other monographs to Kirtas with plans to digitize some 100,000 monographs during the project's first phase.

"Just these 100,000 books will add some 30 million pages of scholarly content for Web users worldwide," said Oya Rieger, project lead and associate director of CUL's Digital Library and Information Technologies.

The project will greatly enhance Cornell's growing digitized collection, which is freely available and already includes:

In addition to materials it has digitized, the library also hosts several repositories of such "born digital" materials as arXiv (postings by users in physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science and quantitative biology) and DSpace (an open-source repository for research data used at 100 institutions worldwide).