[CSG Winter 2007] MBooks at University of Michigan

- Project partnership with Google publicly announced in 2004 December - scanning 7 million print volumes over 4-6 years. Direct scanning costs are borne by Google.

UM receives a copyof all digital files, including OCSR and metadata which can be used to build services. UM can share, with some restrictions. Each volume page produces 2.01 files on average - will be about 2.2 billion files, 380 TB of data. Sustained rate of 3.16 MB per second for four years.

Data characteristics - well defined file formats - image files are TIFF or JPEG 2000, OCR files and metadata are UTF-8 text. Indefinite retention. Files are largely static. Much material is in copyright, so requires security practices.

Mbooks service - can search and look at books online.

There's interest in using the OCR data for textual analysis research.

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