Million Book Project Partners Meeting: Grant for a Research and Coordination Meeting

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This proposal requests funds for a "Million Book Project" partners research and coordination meeting to be held on November 2-4, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Annual project partners'meetings have been held since 2002 in locations at the primary participating nations: China in 2002, India in 2003, the United States in 2004, China in 2005, and Egypt in 2006. The Million Book Project was begun in 2000, aiming to be the most ambitious mass digitization project ever undertaken. The initial goal was to digitize and provide free-to-read access to one million books by 2007. A $3M ITR grant was made by the NSF and highly leveraged by international partners. To date the Project has scanned over 1.4 million books in China, India and Egypt, in the process stimulating new research in areas associated with large-scale, multi-lingual database storage, retrieval and presentation of results. This meeting will continue valuable ongoing processes of communication, planning, interaction and coordination necessary to continue progress. Key topics to be explored include machine translation and summarization, intellectual property and rights management issues, improving and providing centralized access to the metadata, usability issues, growing the collection, diversity, dissemination, education and others.