Student employees at Brigham Young University recently scanned the 5,000th book into the Harold B. Lee Library’s Internet Archive project.
A Japanese book, "Saito Musashi-bo Benkei: Tales of the wars of the Gempei, being the story of the lives and adventures of Iyo-no-Kami Minamoto Kuro Yoshitsune and Saito Musashi-bo Benkei the warrior monk," by James S. De Benneville, was written in 1910. The book can be accessed on the American Libraries website at www.archive.org/details/saitomusashibobe02debe.
Books in the public domain published prior to 1923 are selected to be scanned by faculty and subject librarian recommendations. Items from the L. Tom Perry Special Collections are evaluated for inclusion in the Internet Archive project. Statistics are also run on the rest of the public circulating collections to see if patrons have a high need for a particular work.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit project that was founded to build an Internet library to share information worldwide. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive was the idea of Brewster Kahle, computer engineer, internet entrepreneur and digital librarian.
"One of the greatest features of the Internet Archive project is that it digitizes the words on each page enabling a keyword search," said Roger Layton, communications director for the Lee Library.
Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images and software as well as archived webpages in the Lee Library collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.
More information on the Internet Archive can be found at www.archive.org. For more information on the Lee Library, contact Roger Layton at 801-422- 6687, roger_layton@byu.edu.
Writer: Cierra Brooke Nye
