Million Book Project

Project name and URL
Million Book Project
http://www.ulib.org/

Organization name
Led by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University, the project has many partners in United States, China, Egypt, and India.

Description of what was digitized
Books in any language. The digitization of the first million books, less than 1% of the books published worldwide, was achieved in 2006-2007. The project avoids digitizing copyrighted materials, but there are many copyrighted items in the database with limited access.

Audience for the project (stated or assumed)
The project aims to preserve and provide access to all human knowledge for men and women worldwide.

Type of project background information available on the site
The funding of the project was from multiple sources, including money and manpower, that support the 50 copy centers functioning worldwide. One notable thing of the Million Book Project is that it accept gift that guarantee specified collection to be digitized. Most of the information is the concept and vision of the project, not much detail on how it works.

Additional comments
This is the only one site of the five digital library web portals I have problem accessing with Google Chrome. Universal Library web portal provides powerful search tools and intuitive interface, but the response time is extremely slow, possibly due to the high usage rate and large database. This is a project with great vision, with digitized items from all language and partners worldwide. An institution from Egypt is the most recent partner of the Million Book Project. It still got a long way to go.