The Canadian division of the Internet Archive is laying off up to 75 per cent of its staff this week.
The group, run out of a small office on the seventh floor of Robarts Library, has uploaded nearly 350,000 texts to www.archive.org, one of the world’s largest digital archives. But since initial grant money to start the project in 2003 has been spent, and no new donors have been forthcoming, the project has been forced to downsize drastically.
“We always knew that it was going to slow down at some point, because of the issues surrounding funding such a large scanning center,” said Jonathan Bengtson, director of library and archives for U of T.
Since it started in 2004, the core funding for the project has been provided by the university. A partnership between the Internet Archive and Microsoft — for their Live Search Books service — later bolstered this with a grant.
When that money ran out in 2008, the office was funded through a series of arrangements and grants with the Canadian Knowledge Research Network. Under these agreements, the university uploaded materials for open access, based on requests from partner organizations. The project broadened its scope, documenting specialized collections.
However, widespread financial difficulties facing Canadian universities mean such funding may no longer be available. Those involved with the project are not optimistic funding will ever be restored to prior levels – currently around $100,000 per month, soon to be reduced to $30,000.
Though the office had initially experimented with automated scanning robots, the machines were unable to adapt to the wide variety of manuscripts and books. In 2005, the Internet Archive developed their own machines called Scribes, equipped with two high-resolution digital cameras poised above a v-shaped desk.
These machines require human operators to turn the pages, meaning that they are more expensive to run than automated robots, but can handle fragile texts. An experienced operator can turn and scan two pages every six seconds, but layoffs mean the number of operators will drop from 27 down to 11. Output is expected to drop significantly, from current levels of around 1,500 books a month to 250.
Gabe Juszel, the director of the Canadian office, said his staff “are from all walks of life: film makers, copy editors, artists, some folks pursuing their masters of library science degree.”
Despite the occasionally monotonous work, Juszel says many of his staff have been working at the office for several years. He believes the high retention rate stems from the appeal of “walking into a top academic institution and making the world a better place, one page at a time.”
Even after the downsizing, he adds, the Robarts location is “the only mass center in Canada — we are the biggest and the best.”
Despite the looming cuts to staff, which will be officially processed on August 12, the Canadian office has performed admirably over the years.
“Unlike our American counterparts in California, which very quickly downsized, ceased their mass digitization entirely, or transferred operations to Google Books [whose digitization effort has been since been stalled by legal troubles], our office has remained disproportionately large,” said Bengtson.
The scanning centre at U of T has contributed some of the most widely downloaded texts to the online library, ranging from a tenth-century medieval manuscript to a 1766 edition of the first English dictionary.
