Project Open Book is a program developed by the preservation unit of the Yale University Library in conjunction with the Xerox Corporation to convert 35mm microfilm reproductions of 10,000 nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐ century volumes on US and European history into a digital image library. The project was started in 1991 with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (which oversaw the creation of the microfilm reels as part of its Brittle Books Program) and has by now gone through a testing phase in which 2,000 volumes were converted from microfilm to digital images.
Although the images are currently stored on optical discs at Yale, an experimental World Wide Web interface is being developed to make the images accessible and searchable to remote users. The Project Open Book Web site provides background information on the multiple phases of the project as well as progress reports, technical specifications for the equipment used, and valuable links to online resources for digitization. This reviewer was unable to access the online texts (the experimental image server did not respond after repeated attempts to connect on different occasions); but several online texts have been mounted and more material will be available as the project advances. The site will be most useful to administrators and staff in libraries, archives, and other institutions planning their own digitization programs or to those interested in the application of digital scanning for preservation purposes.
The reports and the presentations available on the Project Open Book site give the timeline for the project (primarily from its inception in 1991 until the end of the test phase in 1996) and detail the processes the project organizers went through when selecting corporate partners, titles to be scanned, equipment, personnel, and storage media. Some of the links are outdated, indicating that much of the site has not been updated in the two years since the test phase was completed.
The available articles, however, offer practical information which those who are new to the digitization field will find beneficial. Precise inventories of the hardware and software used in the project as well as specific documentation of the procedures used by the staff are among the most useful features of the site. The experimental Web server displays images at a resolution of 75 to 100 dpi (somewhat lower resolution than the 600 dpi of the master images but easier to download). It also displays the pages of text alongside an index showing the book’s table of contents.
Xerox has designed the Web interface and search engine for the project and the developers are still adding texts and experimenting with the page contents; so this feature of the site will be under construction for some time. When the full digitized collection is available online, historians will find it an indispensable research tool with contact information for Paul Conway, the project’s administrator and the head of preservation at Yale University Library, and other key figures in the organization.
As many print‐ and microform‐based repositories consider digitizing all or part of their holdings, operations such as Project Open Book can serve as models. Even though the current Web site is still largely a prototype and not a fully‐fledged online digital library, it nevertheless represents an important advancement in the use of digitization techniques for the preservation and increased accessibility of fragile paper‐based collections.
