How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Correction appended
With the financial backing of Abu Dhabi, NYU is planning a partial digitization of Bobst Library.
This will be perhaps NYU Abu Dhabi's most visible change for the university's Washington Square campus. A digital database of select collections in Bobst would serve to connect Abu Dhabi and New York's research materials.
Initially, NYUAD students will have access to NYU's current online resources.
"We do plan on the future digitization of materials at Bobst, for access by those in Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere in the global network university, as curricular and research needs demand it," NYUAD spokesman Josh Taylor wrote in an e-mail.
Additionally, NYUAD plans to "make its own significant acquisitions" for a library in the Emirates. Those books would also be digitized for the benefit of other NYU study abroad sites.
Kirtas Technologies, a leading company in digitization services, has worked to digitize portions of libraries at Yale and Cornell universities and at the University of Pennsylvania.
While working on a Microsoft-funded project at Yale and Cornell, Kirtas was digitizing three million pages a month — to the tune of 10 or 12 cents per page, according to Marketing Operations Manager Todd Whiting. That adds up to approximately $3 to $4 million a year.
NYU currently has no time frame for when the project will start. The university's libraries have a combined 5.1 million volumes.
Whiting noted that there are many variables that go into pricing; universities can purchase the machines and technology from Kirtas, hire their technicians to work on site or ship the books to Kirtas facilities.
Kirtas' digital books are so detailed and complete they can be used to reprint books, Whiting said. Most universities looking to digitize their collections generally choose to include a text-search function in their digitizations, which allows users to search for words and phrases in more than 175 languages, including Arabic.
The large-scale digitization projects at Yale and Cornell did encounter some hiccups. According to Whiting, Kirtas had to develop a completely new machine to digitize the pull-out maps and diagrams in many of the rare books at the two universities.
This article, originally titled "NYUAD: All Bobst holdings will be digitized," originally stated that all of Bobst's books will be digitized. In fact, only portions of the library will be digitized. WSN regrets the error.
