Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Mass Digitization (Google) Project Moved to S&E

On Wednesday, June 16, the last full load of books was shipped from McHenry to be digitized at the Google scan center. These materials will return to the shelves in the first weeks of July. The Mass Digitization Project is now moving to the Science and Engineering Library, where because of the smaller number of eligible materials, it is expected that scanning operations will conclude by the end of fall quarter.

The first shipment of materials to be digitized from the Science & Engineering Library will depart on June 30. Shipments will occur weekly, on Wednesday mornings, and materials will be off the shelves for approximately three weeks. For a few days at the beginning of this period, materials may be off the shelf before their status has been updated in CruzCat (to v:OUT4SCANNING). Likewise, at the end of the three weeks, the status of an item may be updated to reflect that it has returned to the library, but the item itself is waiting to be re-shelved. For this reason, yellow signs will be affixed to areas of the shelves which have been pulled to alert patrons. If you are assisting a patron who is seeking a book that you have reason to believe may be somewhere in the digitization process, please call or email me (ext. 2-7392, mjkramer@ucsc.edu) with identifying information for that book. I will be happy to let you know whether/where the book is in the process, and will arrange to have it brought up to the hold shelf when it returns to the library.

While the process itself can be inconvenient, I hope that the digitization of library materials will ultimately benefit our patrons. Nearly three million books have been scanned from the UC system, and many of those items which are in the public domain are already available for viewing through the HathiTrust or Google Books. CDL is working to make scanned books easily accessible through Next-Generation Melvyl.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the Mass Digitization Project, please contact me at any time.

Maric

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