Communications of the ACM
Dean of Libraries' Final Chapter at CM
"The power of digitization is knowledge," says Gloriana St. Clair, the dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
In the original 1960s television series Star Trek, all one had to do was ask the ship's computer a question and it would automatically search through every book ever written to find the relevant information for the answer. This is what Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon's dean of University Libraries, hopes for the future of libraries.
Since 1999, St. Clair has been working alongside colleagues in the School of Computer Science to digitize millions of books. Digitizing books is "the direction society is going in," according to St. Clair, who has worked in the library business since 1963. With Carnegie Mellon computer science professors Raj Reddy, Michael Shamos, and Jaime Carbonell, St. Clair developed the Million Book Project. Collaborating with several U.S. partners and a broad coalition of libraries and computer scientists in India and China, the project digitized over 1.5 million books and made them free to read on the Internet.
From The Tartan
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