Philosophy of Content Selection

The Million Book Project envisages to develop a collection of one million digital books by adopting a staged approach as described below. The Million Book project will adhere to the copyright law.

1. Coordination of Selection

Creating one digital copy and mirroring it in different locations will suffice, and will support the multiple uses at any time. Preliminary discussions with OCLC as a host for a registry of scanned items are underway. Certain key projects, such as the Making of America project, are already represented in the OCLC database as digital books. Other large digitization projects may require some data entry of their content in order to avoid duplication.

Books denoting ancient historical events of India, cultural and social books in different languages are digitized. These materials are obtained from authorized university public libraries in India. Palmleaves, journals and manuscripts are also digitized. Microfische, Microfilms also can be digitized and processed under this project.

2. Non-copyrighted materials

Materials which are free of copyright as per the Indian Copyright Act 1957 may be scanned for this project. To reduce the costs of selection, the project will probably develop a strategy of selecting key topics and then removing large runs of books and journals from a selected repository. Having a reasonable turn-around time will be essential to the success of the project. A strategy has been devised to understand the logistics of shipping the materials and the impact of their absence from the home library.

If the published books are identified to be under copyright, the book will be removed within a duration of two months after the claim of the book on the website.

4. Best books approach

The project will seek publisher permission to scan books from Books for College Libraries (BCL), one source for core academic books in English. A previous study done at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries indicates that 22% of publishers granted permission for scanning and mounting on the web. The materials in the study were a random sample of Carnegie Mellon Llibraries books and included a broad range of dates, publishers, and in and out of print status.. Numerous difficulties from out of business publishers, lack of publisher records, return of copyright to authors, and other circumstances were identified. Subsequently, Carol Hughes, the collections development officer for Questia, corroborated Carnegie Mellon's experience.

Publishers increasingly see that digital presentation of their works can attract buyers. They are interested in exploring ways in which their out of print titles may be returned to profitability. Continued work with publishers through the course of this project may attract many of them to it. That would be most beneficial in enriching the content to be made available.