Enduring Legacy: Million Book Project Turns 20 (a recording)
Channel: Frederick FN Noronha
Date: 2021-08-24

From an online event organised by the Internet Archive. 
A description by the organisers: "Think back to 2001. Computers were slow and clunky. The thought of actually reading an entire book on one seemed laughable. So when a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University proposed creating a free library of one million digital books, many asked, “Why?”

But Turing Award-winner, Raj Reddy, has always been a techno-optimist. In 2001, Reddy launched the Universal Digital Library project, with the goal to create a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. With funding from the National Science Foundation and partners in the United States, China, India and Egypt, the Universal Digital Library was the first global project to digitize books at a huge scale. In North America, it inspired a new generation of librarians and technologists to carry on the work.

From Google Books, to University of Toronto Libraries, to the Internet Archive's Open Libraries Project—tens of millions of books have been digitized and brought online, now available for research, data mining, greater accessibility, and sheer reading pleasure. 

This year, Reddy’s Universal Digital Library turns 20. Join us for Enduring Legacy: the Million Book Project Turns 20, where we  trace the evolution of book digitization at scale in North America. From Wikipedia's "Turn every Link Blue" initiative to Hathi Trust’s advances in access to the print disabled and computational research, we explore the impact of bringing millions of books online. With founder Raj Reddy and giants in the field, we ask: What is unlocked when millions of books are online? 20 years later, what do they predict for the future of books?" Recorded by Frederick Noronha (FN).