Mass Digitization Leftovers: Digitizing Public Domain Books from the Stacks
Document Type
Presentation
Date of Original Version
12-4-2025
DOI
10.5281/zenodo.17940816
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Abstract
In the early 2000s, the heyday of mass digitization, large universities participating in the Google Books Project and other efforts aimed to digitize their entire print holdings and put them online. As a result, you can find most older published books in Google Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, or smaller collections (with full-text access varying based on copyright status). Given the vast scope of previous mass digitization efforts, universities have mostly moved on to digitizing unique, rare, or archival collections. The same is true for URI, where recently we have been concentrating on scanning master's theses, dissertations, and student newspapers to include in the IR. But I recently became curious about whether any non-unique titles from our regular stacks were not yet available online. It seemed unlikely that any of these would have escaped the mass digitization dragnet. To investigate this question, I researched approximately 1600 titles from the stacks—specifically, titles that were published in the US between 1924 and 1929, which had recently entered the public domain and could be made openly available. To my surprise, about 2% of them were not yet available online. They included scientific studies of animals and plants, history of science, novels, poetry, local history, and even pharmacy. We have begun scanning these and adding them to our IR (https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/pd-books/) as well as the Internet Archive. This project is a great way for URI to contribute to our collective online, shared commons of published books, and indicates that other university libraries may have a similar percentage of public domain books that are not yet digitized. However, it is also time consuming to identify these titles, and we don’t know how much usage they will generate. To my knowledge, this is a unique approach to prioritizing materials for digitization. I will discuss the pros and cons.
Recommended Citation
Lovett, J. (2025, December 15). Mass Digitization Leftovers: Digitizing Public Domain Books from the Stacks. Zenodo. Northeast Institutional Repository Day (NIRD). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17940816