Big digitization project keeping us busy

This autumn the library has hummed with the swish of books being pulled off shelves by the hundreds. At the end of September the Internet Archive (archive.org) found that their paying clients couldn't supply them with books fast enough for their massive book digitization project. We are only too happy to oblige to fill the intermittent gaps. We've always looked forward to creating a digital corollary to our shelves. We see our library as, among other things, an experiment in the creative tension between digital and analog ways of accessing information. Having a partial digital library as a complement to its analog source is part of that plan. We're grateful to the IA for donating its resources to us. They've just become our biggest donor. Choosing the books for digitization has brought both of us back to one of our earliest common hobbies: musing and investigating which books and periodicals published between 1924 and 1964 had their copyrights renewed, and which had not. The digital books that the IA is creating this fall from our library will be in the production phase for another couple of months, so they're not yet available online. We will post in this space as soon as they are.

This fall we've also been proverbially "too busy to blog" for other reasons as well: lots of classes visiting the library on field trips from CCA and from the San Francisco Art Institute; creating bookplates and bookmarks to track the volumes that were submitted to, and withheld from, the Internet Archive scanning project. And of course regular work. We greatly appreciate the help of dedicated volunteer Pamela Jackson this fall who has provided invaluable assistance with all aspects of library operations. --Megan