What is mass digitization?
The goal of mass digitization is not to create individual collections but to digitize the books in the world’s libraries on a grand scale – ideally, every book ever printed. Millions of books from the UC Libraries will be scanned through our participation in mass digitization projects. To do this economically and with some speed, mass digitization is based on the efficient photographing of books, page-by-page, and subjecting those images to optical character recognition (OCR) software to produce searchable text. Human intervention is reduced to a minimum so the OCR output is generally used without undergoing additional revision. Also, only limited structural markup, such as page numbers, tables of contents, and indices, are included.
