University of Maine to Offer Greater Access to Rare Materials through Digital Partnership
Contact: Gretchen Gfeller, Web and Public Relations Specialist, 207-581-1696
ORONO — The University of Maine has reached an agreement with BookSurge International to make available out-of-print books in Fogler Library through Amazon.com’s print-on-demand services. This partnership will allow Fogler Library to achieve partial cost recovery of its efforts to digitize books, the products of which will be freely available to the public for online reading through its website.
The book digitizing project uses a cutting-edge book scanner, developed by Kirtas Technologies, that facilitates large-scale scanning of bound volumes by virtue of its automated page-turning technology. Fogler Library envisions using this technology to create digital collections of public domain publications with full-text searching and online access. The collections now planned include: University of Maine publications, historical Maine town reports, local Maine histories, and publications relating to Wabanaki peoples. The library is only able digitize materials out of copyright (published before 1923), in the public domain (government documents) or for which the University of Maine owns the copyright (university publications).
“This project will dramatically enhance our ability to support research in history, the social sciences, the environment, genealogy, and on various public policy issues, ” explained Fogler Library Dean Joyce Rumery. “It will also make a significant contribution towards our goal of making our holdings available to all Maine residents, since researchers will no longer have to come to Orono to use them.”
Fogler Library anticipates that the first digitized materials will be publicly available by September 2007.