Scholars' Evaluation and Analysis of Major Digitization Projects

With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in partnership with Georgetown University, CLIR is conducting a project to assess the utility to scholars of several large-scale digitization projects.

CLIR's project focuses on Google Book Search, Microsoft's Live Book Search, Project Gutenberg, Perseus, and the ACLS Humanities E-Book project as the main sources for analysis of digitized content. CLIR will ask scholars from historical and literary areas of study to summarize key methodological considerations in conducting research in their disciplines. Scholars will then assess each mass digitization project under scrutiny, and each will submit a report. The reports will be synthesized and recommendations drawn from them. The summary will serve as the basis of a larger meeting of scholars in November 2007 to discuss the findings and recommendations and to determine next steps. Chief among these will be a strategy for working with individual and corporate database developers to improve the utility of these databases to scholars. CLIR will issue a public report early in 2008.

Read the proposal (PDF file) >>