The principal benefit of the
Digital Library will be to supplement the formal
education system by making knowledge available
to anyone who can read and has access. Libraries
have played a vital role in the advancement
of human society. Societal advance depends on
young people having access to books via libraries
and other means. We expect that making this
unique web resource available free to everyone
around the world will enhance the learning process.
A few large public libraries
have several million volumes. However, most
junior colleges, high schools, and public libraries
have much smaller collections. Making this large
knowledge repository can revolutionize research
at all levels of education and give a much-needed
boost at minimal cost to our national educational
infrastructure. This impact will be further
enhanced given the convenience of online access,
and the benefit of full text searching at word
and phrase levels.
A secondary benefit of online
search is to make locating the relevant information
inside of books far more reliable and much easier.
Student success in finding exactly what they
seek will increase and increased success will
enhance student willingness to perform research
using this large resource. NCES reports that
84 percent of libraries around the country are
open between 60 and 80 hours a week. This digital
library would be open all the 168 hours the
week on a 24x7x365 basis. More than one individual
will be able to use the same book at the same
time. Thus, popular works will not be checked
out and thus unavailable to others.
This project will produce an
extensive and rich test bed for use in further
textual language processing research. It is
hoped that at least 10,000 books among the million
will be available in more than one language,
providing a unique resource for example based
machine translation.
Many believe that information
is now doubling every two years. Machine summarization,
intelligent indexing, and information mining
are tools that will be needed for individuals
to keep up in their discipline work, in their
businesses, and in their personal interests.
This large digitization project will enable
extensive research in these areas.
