Paul Courant wrote in his Au Courant blog on February 2 that the University of Michigan achieved a significant milestone: it had just put the one millionth book digitized from its collection online. “As far as I know Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its own collections digitized and available for search (and, when in the public domain, available for viewing.)
Paul also refers to the UM’s Million Web site devoted to this milestone, and it is indeed “pretty cool”. There’s a link to the full-text version of the one millionth digitized book, Maria Mitchell, life, letters and journals published in 1896. A slide show gives a set of statistics about what one million digitized books mean, including:
- The efforts of 436 University of Michigan Library staff
- 361,441,145 pages
- 83,333 linear feet
- 42 terabytes
- 750 tons
- 146 miles (laid end-to-end, the distance from Philadelphia to Washington DC)
- 428 languages
- 351,028 author records
- 135,432 subjects
That’s an average of 7.38 books per subject.
The MBooks Michigan Digitization Project Workflow diagram is really interesting!
The site also has pictures of some of the 436 staff involved, linked to two Flickr collections, Details of Digitization and The People Behind One Million Digitized Books.
It’s a milestone we can all enjoy. Congratulations to all the University of Michigan Library staff!
Karen Smith-Yoshimura, senior program officer, topics related to creating and managing metadata with a focus on large research libraries and multilingual requirements. Karen retired from OCLC November 2020.
Hey Chris, thanks for providing the scavenger hunt! I bet there’s even more METS represented in the media. I also like the references to the copyright evidence-gathering process. Soup to nuts, and done with the usual Michigan spirit of celebration.
That is a lot of METS…
Can the METS enthusiasts in the crowd (I know there are some!) spot the two instances of METS in the “Details of Digitization” photoset? Just think — a million books = a million METS documents.