This gives us some further insight into the digital immortal salvation that Google is bringing to ancient books. Meditative process indeed.
Digitizing ancient books a laborious process
Globally, hundreds of librarians turning pages for Google
Natasha Robinson, Associated Press
In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.
Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that eventually will lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.
The manual scanning - up to 600 pages a day - is much slower than Google's regular process.
"It's monotonous," said Mitchel, 24. "But it's still something that I'm learning about - how to interact with really old materials and working with digital imaging, which is relevant to art history."
The unusually tight binding on the early 16th century polyglot Bible made it hard to expose the portions toward the book's middle as Mitchel spread each pair of pages for the scanner. Librarians believe it is the oldest Bible in the world with Arabic type.
Google, the Internet's leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it, except to say it is much faster than what Mitchel is doing and is not destructive.
Many libraries began digitizing books a decade ago to preserve them. Funding from Google allows the 28 libraries it is working with to cut their digitizing costs, because they do not have to pay for scanning the books Google wants to include in Book Search.
Through Book Search, users can track down a book on any topic and read a small portion. If the book is not protected by copyright, users can download the whole thing. If it is, or if they just want to read an original, they can use Book Search to find copies to buy or borrow.
More than 1 million rare or fragile books have been digitized through the Google-Michigan partnership since it began in 2004, with an estimated 6 million to go.
In the room where Mitchel and colleague Chava Israel, an artist, work, the temperature is always in the 60s.
Each technician has a slightly angled table with a flexible middle that cradles books and holds them still while two overhead cameras photograph the pages. Sometimes the women play music or listen to news online, but often they work in silence, save the clicks of their computers and scanners.
Mitchel glides in a rolling chair between scanner and computer, computer and scanner, turning page upon page and clicking her mouse to shoot each pair. Once the images reach the computer, the women use the book scanning software Omniscan from Germany's Zeutschel GmbH to clean them up.
A final click of the mouse sends each digitized book to Google for optical character-recognition processing, which makes the text searchable. Google then returns a copy of the images and data to the library and posts another to the Web.
Israel, 44, who has been scanning books for three years, takes a philosophical view of the project.
"My favorite part is working with older books and being able to preserve a lot of the knowledge and help bring more people access," Israel said. "I turn pages. It's kind of meditative."
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