How long will it take to feed 25 million pages through an ADF? Live Search Books at the British Library

And I thought that it was a chore to digitize our papers at home… that’s nothing as compared to the effort to scan 25 million pages… 

Raissa Kasolowsky from Reuters reports here on one project associated with the Live Search Books effort. The article calls out some of the challenges of adding content online, as a team at the British Library in London “is working 14 hours a day to scan shelf upon shelf of books.”

“Launched a year ago, the project will scan 25 million carefully preserved pages of the British Library’s 19th-century archive, around 100,000 books, over the next two years. Together with collections from other libraries including Yale and Cornell University, the pages are destined for Live Search Books, Microsoft’s answer to Google Book Search.

“When we are able to do a better job of answering people’s questions we are going to build loyalty and then ultimately increase the size of our user community,” said Cliff Guren, Microsoft Director of Publisher Evangelism…

Full story at globeandmail.com: “In Microsoft vs. Google, search is still master“