Vauhini Vara, a writer for the Wall Street Journal co-wrote a story with David Kesmodel in today's Wall Street Journal called, "Building an Online Library, One Volume at a Time." She says: "Liz Ridolfo is a foot soldier in the massive undertaking to digitize the world's books. She is one of about a dozen scanners employed by the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit group that is spearheading the Open Content Alliance, which aims to build an online library of millions of old books and hopes to make a big batch accessible through Web searches as early as next year."
It takes Ms. Ridolfo and the other scanners about one hour to scan a 500-page book. If a book is in poor condition — if pages are hanging by a thread, for instance — it can take several hours. The Toronto group, which is responsible for the bulk of the books scanned so far by the project, has digitized books from the Library and Archives of Canada, the University of Ottawa and St. Mary's College in California. The oldest book scanned was a 1475 title, "The City of God," by St. Augustine. The books can be searched on a page for books from Canadian libraries.
Ms. Ridolfo finished her shift by scanning two books by Mr. Chesterton and most of a third — bringing her total to almost five books in five hours. She has scanned about 125 books for the project.
She said the job is one of the best she has ever had. She has worked other repetitive jobs, including stocking shelves at a grocery store and working in a beer-nut factory. Before she started book scanning, she took a temp job stapling sample sticks of chewing gum to fliers handed out at Toronto nightclubs. "It was akin to hell," she said.
She's paid about $10.15 an hour to scan the books.
