June 23rd 
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Watch out Google, you’re officially being targeted by an extremely unlikely source: Germany. That’s right, the German Digital Library plans to make millions of books, films, images and even audio recordings available and accessible online via digital conversion. The good news for the German library and bad news for Google is that already more than 30,000 libraries, museums and existing archives are expected to contribute digitized cultural artifacts.
The German Digital Library is using a digitization technique that currently is processing 1,216 pages per hour and to date has already scanned almost 45,000 works. Clearly, time is the only issue in their process and reports say the first trial version might hit the web in 2011. The library expects to have 5.5 million books digitized within the next decade. Google, on the other hand, has reportedly scanned over ten million books as of October 9, 2009 (www.googleblog.blogspot.com). Can the German Digital Library offer any real competition for Google? Should they simply allow Google to take over their works as well?
It’s hard to say, at this point. While The German Digital Library has many factors playing against their cause, including cost and accessibility, the project would be a huge win and progressive step for the library. At the root of it all, specialized document scanning services offer the ability to digitally preserve everything from rare books and folios to unique local community records preserving our thoughts, images and words for the future. Be it Google or the German Digital Library, the idea is exquisite.
To learn more about how libraries can employ the very same type of digital conversion techniques, check out the document scanning services offered by microMEDIA.
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