In Spring 2011, Amazon announced that sales of e-books through its Kindle service had surpassed sales of print books on Amazon.com. While e-books may seem like a recent technological development (the Kindle was introduced November 2007) they have actually been available for many years in the academic environment. Early English Books Online (EE BO), which provides the full-text of over 100,000 titles published in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America from 1475-1700, was introduced at Western Libraries in 2001. Through EE BO Western scholars can study the earliest editions of works shaping the beginnings of modern science and philosophy, as well as classic literary, religious and political texts using their desktop, laptop or portable mobile device.
Acquiring and making available e-books is one example of how academic library collections are changing in the digital age. The future of academic library collections also includes the digitization of local holdings to enable broader access and use of unique research materials. Through the last several years Western Libraries has been steadily building experience with digitization through a number of projects, such as a collaboration with the School of Graduate Studies to establish an electronic thesis and dissertation program for Western (http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/) and a partnership with Internet Archive and the Ontario Council of University Libraries to digitize 1,400 textbooks from the Ontario Textbook Collection, featuring textbooks used in Ontario classrooms between 1846-1970.
The electronic versions of these textbooks, part of the James Alexander and Ellen Rea Benson Special Collections, are available through the Shared Library Catalogue (www.lib.uwo.ca) and Internet Archive website (www.archive.org) for free download in a variety of e-formats.
There is no shortage of possibilities for future digitization projects at Western Libraries which holds many unique treasures. The C.B. ‘Bud’ Johnston Library (Business) has begun to digitize their historical Canadian Annual Report Collection using a grant from the technology company EMC . It is anticipated that the grant will cover part of the costs associated with digitization, which is an expensive undertaking.
In addition to converting materials (while ensuring the integrity of the original item) the resulting digital files require descriptive text, often called meta-data, to enable their discovery and use and a storage/retrieval solution. The work is labour intensive and specialized and the hardware/software needed to create a digital archive costly, given the pace at which technology advances. The costs of digitization increase when a collection poses unique challenges, either because of its nature (eg, images rather than text) or its size. Perhaps the best example is The London Free Press Photo Negative Collection, which numbers in excess of 1.6 million images. While not all of these images can or will be digitized, preserving even a fraction of the Collection is a major undertaking.
And yet without investment in digitization projects, Western is at risk of losing and/ or severely compromising access to unique treasures. The Vintage Football Film Digitization Project is an example of a collection that has been saved through digitization. In addition, there are countless other materials belonging to Western Libraries that have the potential to contribute to preserving the institutional memory of our university and research being undertaken locally and globally.
To learn more visit: www.westernmakesa difference.ca/priorities/libraries.html. Your gift will help Western educate the next generation of global leaders.
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