U.S. - China joint project on digital library
The Ministry of Education of China (MOE) and National Science Foundation of USA (NSF) has jointly funded a China-US Million Book Project (MBP), to create an American Digital Academic Library (CADAL) in China. The library will provide a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, with a half million Chinese books and a half million English books, available to everyone over the Internet. By now, 203,000 volumes of Chinese books and materials had been scanned, and another 85 thousand Chinese books and materials had been selected for scanning in the coming months. Over 25,000 volumes of English books selected from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) libraries in summer 2004 have been scanned, and the first container with more than 25 thousand books is shipping to China from Hong Kong University Library.
According to the criteria of book selection in the project, materials of the following categories are given preference for digitization: basic core university library collection; books without copyright issue such as government publications, books whose copyright either expired or never existed, and books whose copyrights are granted for digitization by the publishers; born-digital content, such as technical reports, master and doctor thesis, conference proceedings, manuscripts etc.
In China, the project is led by Zhejiang University and Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is jointly implemented by Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Wuhan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Zhongshan Uni., Jilin Uni., Sichun University, and Beijing Normal University.
There will be the 1st International Conference on Universal Digitized Library held at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, from 31 Oct. to 2 November, 2005