About Us
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Page 5 of 14 GOALS : General belief is that it is impossible to capture all books in Rich Text Format even in hundreds of years and it was our primary objective, although a long term one, to convert the images (pages of the books) into RTF. Hence we had to convince ourselves as to the feasibility of the project and we started by undertaking the task of converting as many books as possible in a short span of time and make it a continuous and ongoing process by using the latest technology and we firmly believe that it will revolutionize the process of education in much of the world. Libraries are unevenly distributed around the world and within each country. In the U.S. the NCES Survey noted that in 1996, 3,408 of 3,792 institutions of higher education had libraries holding 806.7 million volumes. The 112 largest university libraries in the United States and Canada each have at least 1.8 million books. They are members of the Association for Research Libraries. Massachusetts has about 25 million volumes; New York has about 31 million volumes, and California has about 40 million volumes in their ARL Libraries (Association for Research Libraries, 1999/2000). Other states, such as North and South Dakota, have no large libraries. A few large public libraries have several million volumes. However, most junior colleges, high schools, and public libraries have much smaller collections. Making this large knowledge repository can revolutionize research at all levels of education and give a much-needed boost at minimal cost to our national educational infrastructure. This impact will be further enhanced given the convenience of on-line access, and the benefit of full text searching at word and phrase levels. A secondary benefit of on-line search is to make locating the relevant information inside of books far more reliable and much easier. Student’s success in finding exactly what they seek will increase and increased success will enhance student willingness to perform research using this large resource. NCES reports that 84 percent of libraries around the country are open between 60 and 80 hours a week. This image based digital library would be open all the 168 hours the week on a 24x7x365 basis. More than one individual will be able to use the same book at the same time. Thus, popular works will not be checked out and thus unavailable to others. |
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