On the seventh floor of Robarts Library a new generation of digital scribes flip the pages of old books under glass enclosures, while Canon 5Ds mounted with powerful, sharp macro lenses click every four seconds, feeding images of text into a computer that churns them out as full-text searchable PDFs available for download at Archive.org. This is the Internet Archive—well, U of T’s contribution to the Internet Archive, an international, multilingual catalogue that is the great alternative to Google for the digitization of books. The IA presents far fewer legal dilemmas than Google, as it digitizing only those books already out of copyright. You might not think that a Farmers’ Almanac from 1884 or a book on ornamental street lighting from 1912 would be that interesting to read, but this project is providing scholars with research opportunities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. The archive contains material from libraries and collections worldwide that used to be under strict lock and key. A photo series, headed “One more reason to go digital,” posted on the wall of the Robarts facility, depicts rows of library shelves fallen all over one another, the result of some accident. There’s the incentive for libraries to digitize their material, and the IA offers the framework for them to do just that.
