<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Saturday, March 27, 2004  

The Universal Library
http://www.ulib.org/

The mission of The Universal Library hosted by Carnegie Mellon University is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, primarily in the English language, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background. The first major project of Universal Library is the Million Book Digital Library project. Typical large high-school libraries house fewer than 30,000 volumes. Most libraries in the world have less than a million volumes. The total number of different titles indexed in OCLC’s WorldCat is about 48 million. One million books, therefore, is more than the holdings of most high-schools, and is equivalent to the libraries at many universities and represents a useful fraction of all available books.

One of the goals of the Universal Library is to provide support for full text indexing and searching based on OCR (optical character recognition) technologies where available. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student's success in their research endeavors. This 24x7 resource would also provide an excellent testbed for language processing research in areas such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information retrieval. This will be added to Academic Sources 2004 Internet MiniGuide.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:10 AM
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