Brewster Kahle
President
Internet Archive
Last spring, Brewster Kahle received the Paul Evan Peters award on behalf of the work of the Internet Archive. In his speech he outlined an approach that might be used to digitize a 300 page book for $10. This fall, the University of Toronto took Brewster Kahle up on his experiment to digitize a large volume of books. Working in partnership, the University and the Internet Archive have created a pilot scanning project using Kirtas’ APT 1200 book digitizing robot. The research project’s objectives (to be completed this fall) are to determine if the Kirtas robot’s bitonal system could be converted to produce color images, what the challenges were to setting up a scanning production environment, and how to process a high volume of books and get them online in a readable manner. In addition, the pilot project would determine if the $10/300 page book number in Brewster’s award talk was an accurate assessment of robotic high volume scanning. We will bring the resulting scans and some bound books printed from those scans, so that people can see the current quality level.