Building Trust When Truth Fractures

In our current era of disinformation, ready access to trustworthy sources is critical. “Fake news,” sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and propaganda distort the common reality, polarize communities, and threaten open democratic systems. What citizens, journalists, and policymakers need is a canonical source of trusted information. For millions, that trusted source resides in the books and journals housed in libraries, curated and vetted by librarians. Yet today, as we turn inevitably to our screens for information, if a book isn’t digital, it is as if it doesn’t exist.To address this gap, the Internet Archive is actively working with the world’s great libraries to digitize their collections and to make them available to users via controlled digital lending, a process whereby libraries can loan digital copies of the print books on their shelves. By bringing millions of missing books and academic literature online, libraries can empower journalists, researchers, and Wikipedia editors to cite the best sources directly in their work, grounding readers in the vetted, published record, and extending the investment that libraries have made in their print collections

ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS

Second International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives, abstracts of presentation

The Internet Archive: An Interview with Brewster Kahle

In this interview, founder and director of the 'Internet Archive' Brewster Kahle talks about the cornerstone of modern librarianship: mass digitization. A leading figure in the open access movement, Kahle discusses the creation of the 'Internet Archive' and the challenges facing education today. He reflects on the labour of scanning, the creation of digital content, and explains the economy of digitization that underpins the' Internet Archive'. He considers deaccessioning and the need to start storing not just digital data but physical books. In the context of his 1996 manifesto ‘Archiving the Internet’' '(included here as an appendix), he explores his own trajectory as a digital librarian as he explains the motto of the 'Internet Archive': ‘universal access to all knowledge’.<strong></strong

A Metadata Generation System for Scanned Scientific Volumes

Large scale digitization projects have been conducted at digital libraries to preserve cultural artifacts and to provide permanent access. The increasing amount of digitized resources, including scanned books and scientific publications, requires development of tools and methods that will efficiently analyze and manage large collections of digitized resources. In this work, we tackle the problem of extracting metadata from scanned volumes of journals. Our goal is to extract information describing internal structures and content of scanned volumes, which is necessary for providing effective content access functionalities to digital library users. We propose methods for automatically generating volume level, issue level, and article level metadata based on format and text features extracted from OCRed text. We show the performance of our system on scanned bound historical documents nearly two centuries old. We have developed the system and integrated it into an operational digital library, the Internet Archive, for real world usage