In addition to the existing UNC Scribe digitization program, this project will produce the most comprehensive digital collection to date of core North Carolina state government documents, offering researchers a historical view of the development of the state’s government and infrastructure in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will enrich the lives of citizens of the State of North Carolina by providing online, 24/7 access to vast offerings of historical, geographic, social, and political information using digitization technology developed by the Internet Archive.

Housed in the Digital Production Center of the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, the UNC Library’s Scribe digitization program has contributed over 4,000 titles to the Internet Archive since December 2007. As a result of the Ensuring Democracy through Digital Accessgrant, a second Scribe scanning station will be added to the Library’s digitization program in July 2009.

This project is in keeping with the UNC Library’s strategic goals to support collaborative collection development and investigation of innovative technologies, including large-scale digitization, to become a regional digitization service center for other libraries and archives, especially in North Carolina, and to develop projects and partnerships that emphasize the potential uses of digital content.

We are excited to partner with East Carolina University and the State Library of North Carolina on this project, and to contribute material from our collections and expertise in the digital area.

I think of mass digitization as scanning from A to Z, churning through large quantities of volumes with little or no thought to selection. This idea may be colored a bit by my understanding of Google’s approach to digitization, which has meant, more or less: Find some libraries, agree on some terms (that seem to mostly benefit Google), and start scanning whatever makes its way from the shelf to the cart to the scanner’s hands. I don’t think I’m alone in this belief. In 2006, for example, Karen Coyle defined the phrase as the “conversion of whole libraries without making a selection of individual materials.”

ECU, the Digital Information Management Program at the State Library, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s CDLA were just awarded an NC ECHO grant to digitize 165,000 pages (about 2,500 volumes) of historic state documents over the next two years. That’s pretty large scale for North Carolina. Heck, it’s pretty large scale for just about anyone (minus the big players – Cornell, Michigan, et al.). So, is it mass digitization?

Compared to Google’s approach, ECU, SLNC, and UNC have (and will continue to) carefully vet the books that will get digitized as part of the grant. The best copy from the three institutions will find its way onto the Scribe book scanner, and ultimately into the American Libraries section of the Internet Archive’s website. We have selected books based on priorities defined through a survey of state agency personnel, by representatives from depository libraries around the state, and from librarians working closely with these materials. Once scanned, each volume will undergo careful quality control to ensure that the best digital capture possible was performed. Full color reproductions, no fingers covering text, no missing pages.

It is our hope to create and provide public access to the best and largest “virtual collection” of historic North Carolina state documents. All of this means a lot of work and care will need to go into the project. But, it also means working fast to ensure that the scanners always have another volume to grab off the cart. It means that many, many books will be available in a short period of time.

But, does it mean “mass digitization”? Stepping waaaaay back and looking at libraries, Google, and similar book digitization undertakings, it is safe to say, I think, that the collective “we” are, in fact, mass digitizing books. If, however, we put that “we” under a microscope to look at all of the individual digitization programs around the library world, our approaches lose their uniformity. I think too many of us care too much about the quality of output and the artifactual nature of the volumes. We are constrained by the per-page scanning costs to even consider the Google approach. So, we’re all finding our own way to digitize what we can, however we can, to the best of our institution’s abilities, whether that’s hundreds of thousands of pages per year or just a couple of books.

I guess I’m proposing a synthesis of traditional librarianship and large scale digitization. In addition to greater access that the Google model offers, how about incorporating our role as collection curators into this mix? Call me what you will, but I like the collective nature of the library world’s approach to digitization. It might take a little longer, it probably won’t be the largest collection, and some might even consider our approach “precious” at times. But, in the end, I think, just as we have always done, we’ll create the most useful collection of resources for the broadest audience of researchers.