The library at Princeton Theological Seminary — home to one of the largest collections of religious material in the United States, with more than 1.1 million books and other items — will begin making some of its books available online starting in about a year.
Princeton has struck an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to digitize some material that is out of copyright, generally meaning works published in the United States before 1923. While the seminary’s agreement with Microsoft prohibits releasing specific information on the number of volumes involved, Donald Vogt, the seminary’s collection development librarian, described it as “many thousands of volumes,” that then will be available to users around the world.
“It’s one of the great, exciting directions of this library,” Vogt said in an interview. “It’s a very, very exciting time to be alive and to be working at creating an online avenue for the contents of the library — making global access to the contents of the library a reality. We owe a great deal to Microsoft and the Internet Archive for their interest in this partnership with the seminary.”
Efforts to digitize library collections have gained momentum in recent years, both through Microsoft and other providers, which are working to bring millions of volumes from across the world to a computer screen near you.
Google, for example, has worked through its Google Book Search program with a number of prominent libraries, including those of Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton universities, the University of Oxford, and the New York Public Library.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has given the Library of Congress a $2 million grant to digitize thousands of books in the public domain, with a special emphasis on works about U.S. history and volumes that are viewed as “brittle books” that could be damaged by handling.
The International Children’s Digital Library is trying to make children’s books from around the world, from Mongolia to Kenya, available online as a way to fight illiteracy and teach tolerance. It’s making books available in villages that have an Internet connection but no public library, or to the multi-lingual classrooms of American public schools.
And new devices for reading digital books, such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, likely will increase the market as well, if they catch on.
There has been some controversy and some lawsuits from publishers claiming copyright infringement.
But the digital domain clearly is making inroads in the religious world, as well as in the secular one, as evidenced, for example, by efforts of those developing a new hymnal for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to consider how congregations want to use hymns digitally as well as having hymnbooks in the old-fashioned racks on the backs of pews.
At Princeton seminary, the Microsoft digitizing project is trying to take advantage of some of the strengths of the collection. “We are one of the largest religious collections in the nation,” Vogt said, with a significant Latin American collection, including materials in Spanish and Portuguese. The seminary’s library also has a rare books section with material from the Puritan era and a collection of religious pamphlets.
Already, people come from around the world to use the seminary’s library, and scholars come as well from Princeton University and from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, both of which are nearby.
The catalog is available online, and on its own, the library had begun to digitize some materials specifically related to the seminary’s history, such as some of the writings of Charles Hodge and Archibald Alexander and Samuel Miller, who were instrumental in the seminary’s founding.
With the Microsoft initiative, “we’re extraordinarily grateful for this opportunity to expand our reach in global terms, in making the contents of this library so much more accessible to people across the ocean, for example, who might never have the resources to … travel to the library,” Vogt said.
The system will work so that when a patron searches online for a particular item — either on the library’s Web site, through the Internet Archive, or through Microsoft Live Books — a link will be embedded to direct the person to the digitized version.
Where this will all lead, it’s hard to say.
“Electronic reader technology is improving,” Vogt said. “There also are going to be people who still like to have something on paper to read.”
The technology “is evolving from the printed book to ever-more complex and sophisticated forms of communication. And libraries like our own need to pay attention to that trajectory of evolution,”
The printed book will remain in demand — along with the latest technological twists, he predicts.
