By Nick Norlen, Staff Writer
Approximately a year after Princeton University announced it would digitize its library collection, Princeton Theological Seminary has decided to do the same, with the help of Microsoft’s Live Search Books service.
Announced by the seminary last week, the partnership will eventually allow religious scholars and regular Internet users from around the world to browse the extensive collection of religious texts.
”We can — both through our own Web site as well as through Microsoft Live Search Books program — bring the digital content of our library to a global audience who will not need to travel physically to Princeton to look at the contents of the library but can in fact do that across the Web,” said Donald Vorp, the seminary’s Collection Development Librarian.
The actual scanning of the items will be conducted by the digitization firm Internet Archive, which will set up a scanning center right in the library, Mr. Vorp said.
Test runs of the scanning will be conducted through April, and full production is expected to begin by June, Mr. Vorp said. He and other librarians will supervise which materials are scanned.
According to seminary officials, the digitization will first focus on out-of-copyright materials — primarily pre-1923 content that includes “treasures” like editions of John Calvin and John Knox, Puritan writings, and hymn verses of Isaac Watts.
Some tomes go back to 1475, 1495, and through 1500s and the 1600s, Mr. Vorp said.
”We have valuable first editions that were printed during Luther’s lifetime in 1517, 1520, 1530,” he said.
Despite the sensitive nature of some of the materials, Mr. Vorp said the seminary has every confidence in the process.
”This will give us a chance, of course, to create the digital surrogates of the physical material,” he said, noting that the library will then move to “restrict the access of the actual physical print materials, relying instead as much as we can on the digital surrogates.”
Cliff Guren, the senior director of Publisher Evangelism, which is part of the Live Search Books service, said Microsoft is “delighted by this partnership.”
”It’s very exciting to us to add the theological seminary to our overall corpus,” he said. “We think it’s going to be an enriched experience for all kinds of users.”
Library Director Stephen Crocco agreed.
”It is a big deal because we’ve been collecting here for nearly 200 years,” he said. “While we do our best to make our collections available to people, in the past everyone has had to come to Princeton, or go through the cumbersome process of borrowing things through interlibrary loans, but now these materials will be available to anyone with access to the Internet.”
Still, “we’re not interested in putting libraries out of business,” Mr. Crocco added. “We kind of think that these kind of digital libraries will reinforce the role of libraries in culture and get people to come back to libraries.”
