About China-US Million Book Digital Library Project
The human race would benefit by the creation and deployment of a Universal Digital Library with a vision to provide access to all human knowledge anytime, anywhere, including access, query, and print any book, magazine, newspaper, painting, image, music, video, or reference document. UDL's goal is to promote modern sciences and traditional wisdom to be utilized deeply, to enhance communication and comprehend between different cultures and to expedite human knowledge innovation and civilization progression. The first challenge for UDL is to organize one million books with text and images online and thus globally accessible.
To meet the challenge, China and US parties initiated the China-US Million Book Digital Library Project (short as Million Book Project). Dr. Raj Reddy, Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics of Carnegie Mellon University, as Co-Principal Investigators of US side, Dr. Ching-Chih Chen, Professor and Former Associate Dean at Graduate School of Library and Information at Simmons College, Co-Principal Investigators of US side, Prof. Qin-Ping Zhao, Chief Officer of 211 Office of Ministry of Education of China, Professor of Computer Science of Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics and Dr. Wen Gao, Deputy President and Professor of Computer Science, Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, as Principal Investigators of China side, signed âMemorandum of Understanding on the China-US Million Book Digital Library Projectâ in Dec. 2000.
In Aug. 2001, a Chinese delegacy with eight members led by Professor Yunhe Pan, president of Zhejiang University , visited US to promote Million Book Project. The delegacy visited CMU ( Carnegie Mellon University ), National Science Foundation and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The steering committee responsible for project planning, policy establishing, resource providing and environment constructing. Four committee members from China side were President Yunhe Pan, Dr. Wen Gao (PI), Prof. Chi Huisheng (Vice President of Peking University), Prof. Hu Dongcheng (Vice President of Tsinghua University). Four committee members from China side were Dr. Raj Reddy (Co-PI), Dr. Ching-chih Chen (Co-PI), Dr. Victor Zue (Professor of MIT) and Dr. Gloriana St. Clair (Director of CMU Library).
During the 2nd steering committee meeting hosted by China in Mar. 2002, the US delegacy with 12 members visited the Chinese university libraries involved in the project and the two technical centers in the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhejiang University . India became the 3rd partners of UDL in May. 2002. The 3rd steering committee meeting was hosted by India in Jan. 2003. The Chinese delegacy with 9 members led by Dr. Wen Gao and the US delegacy led by Dr. Raj Reddy visited India partners and the President of India. In 2004, the three countries met at Carnegie Mellon University and some important actions like transporting thousands books to China were started.
China side made great efforts and received lots of support from government and industry. The State Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance of China had agreed to support the China-US Million Book Digital Library Project by a project named as âChinese America Digital Academy Library (short as CADAL)â as a part of the Project 211 in the Tenth Five-year Plan. CADAL is led by Zhejiang University and the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences . Peking Univ. , Tsinghua Univ. , Fudan Univ. , Nanjing Univ. , Shanghai Jiaotong Univ., Xi'an Jiaotong Univ., Wuhan Univ. , Huazhong Univ. of Science and Technology, Zhongshan Univ. , Jilin Univ., Sichun Univ. and Beijing Normal Univ. agrees to take tasks to jointly build CADAL. 80 million RMB is funded to support the organization, scanning and processing of million books.
For China side, under the funding from government at 2004, more the ten university libraries and hundreds of engineers and scanning staffs involved in the Project. Up to the autumn, 1 million and 2 thousand books were digitized. The Million Book Project realized its first-step goal. There are more then 150 thousand books in English and the others in Chinese.
Along with increasing amount of digital books, how to organize the huge amount of data at the level of page and inside and mine the knowledge in the full text and illustrations being cutting out became an important research topic. The north technical center of China for the project is responsible for English books organization and technical support. In the last 3 years, we archived more 150 thousand digital books in English and listed them on the China website for Million Book Project. To help the user access the knowledge inside more easily, the research team of north center study the state-of-art theories and technologies. Based on 150 thousand the English books, we advanced the subject term based book deep organization, million illustration retrieval and context based semantic mining. These works were introduced partly in the first to third International Conference on Universal Digital Library at China of 2005, Egypt of 2006 and USA of 2007. Now all of the technical experiment were redid on all of the 150 thousand English books. Anyone can access all of the books at http://www.ulib.org.cn through the innovation search technologies online. We believe it is a start point for pure digital library.
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