To study the impact of e-books on scholarship, the University of Pennsylvania Library and Oxford University Press will make the full text of every history title published by OUP over the next five years available full-text online to the Penn community. University officials expect the Digital Books Project to total between 1,500 and 2,000 books at its completion. The initiative is funded by a $218,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Because library staffers are converting the text into Adobe Acrobat files instead of scanning them page by page, Director for Information Systems Roy Heinz estimates that it only takes his staff an hour to prepare a 300-page title for online publication. The library is exploring the feasibility of hyperlinking e-text journal citations to their full-text counterparts whenever Penn holds the publication.
“It’s somehow fitting, on the eve of the 21st century, that the library founded by Benjamin Franklin is finding new ways to harness electrons in the service of knowledge,” Vice Provost and Director of Libraries Paul Mosher said April 4.
Posted April 10, 2000.