More than two centuries ago, November 11th was a significant date for another reason; the signing of the Treaty of Canandaigua between the Six Nations of the Iroquois and Timothy Pickering, who signed on behalf of President George Washington and the United States of America. The Treaty was signed on November 11, 1794 in Canandaigua, N.Y., just a short drive down the road from our Kirtas headquarters here in Victor.

The treaty, which is still actively recognized by the United States and the Six Nations, established peace and friendship between the two governments and affirmed land rights for the Iroquois in the state of New York and boundaries established by the Phelps and Gorham Purchase of 1788.

Every year on this date the city of Canandaigua recognizes the importance of the signing of this treaty with a ceremony at the site of the signing. You can learn more by visiting http://www.ganondagan.org/CanandaiguaTreaty.html

You should also check out www.kirtasbooks.com and search for titles with the word “iroquois” or “indian”; there’s a lot of great stuff you can find!

“New technology has allowed the Library to greatly expand access to its collections,” said Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library. “Now, for the first time, library users are able to order copies of specific items from our vast public domain collections that are useful to them. Additionally the program creates a digital legacy for future users of the same item and a revenue stream to support our operations. We are very pleased to participate in a program that is so beneficial to everyone involved.”

Using existing information from NYPL’s catalog records, Kirtas will make the library’s public domain books available for sale through its retail site before they are ever digitized. Customers can search for a desired title on www.kirtasbooks.com and place an order for that book. When the order is placed, only then is it pulled from the shelf, digitized and made available as a high-quality reprint or digital file.

What makes this approach to digitization unique is that NYPL incurs no up-front printing, production or storage costs. It also provides the library with a self-funding, commercial model helping it to sustain its digitization programs in the future. Unlike other free or low-cost digitization programs, the library retains the rights and ownership to their own digitized content.

Whether patrons are looking for a title about a president—such as, Memories of President Lincoln, by Walt Whitman—or by a president—African Game Trails; An account of the African wanderings of an American hunter-naturalist, by Theodore Roosevelt—The New York Public Library is the place to turn. Collections available on Kirtasbooks.com are from NYPL’s General Research Division and include books from the local and U.S. history, genealogy, humanities and social sciences collections. Titles include several 19th century cookbooks, a first print edition of Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer, The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition (1909) by Caroline Taylor, and first edition version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from 1851.

“The New York Public Library is an iconic institution that represents strength, history and knowledge,” said Kirtas Founder and CEO Lotfi Belkhir. “We’re honored to be partnering with them to help make their collections available to the world.”

Kirtas currently has 13 partnerships with universities and public libraries to make special collections available for sale online. Virtually any library with a modern records database and valuable collections can participate in the Digitize on Demand program.

The Espresso is a Point of Sale machine that prints and binds a book, while the consumer waits. Quality has to come into question when someone pays reportedly $8.00 for a book, that is potentially missing pages, contains operator’s hands and the like. (see example below)

An article written by Norman Oder — Library Journal, 9/17/2009 found at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6697430.html actually calls out the questions of quality.

Quality questions
One issue regarding the PoD deal for libraries and other end-users is the quality of the scans. Some libraries, such as the University of Pennsylvania (UP) system, have teamed up with Kirtas Technologies for PoD access to public domain holdings. Nothing is scanned until an order is placed.

Penn officials in February said Kirtas’s scanning process results in a higher quality scan, suitable for PoD.

http://www.Kirtasbooks.com currently has more than 800,000 books available from content partners like UPENN, New York Public Library, McGill and McMaster Universities to name a few. Kirtas Technologies offers the complete digitization solution.

As pointed out by the by the University of Pennsylvania, quality digitization is the key to a truly successful program. Google’s rush to scan everything they can get their hands on as fast as the can has produced less than desirable results for a lot of their library partners. Their poorly captured images, and OCR has facilitated their recent purchase of ReCaptcha in an effort to try to make corrections to some of their previous mistakes.

Captured from Google Books 9/17/09

Charles Dickens
Great Expectations
A Christmas Carol
A Tale of Two Cities
David Copperfield

Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Jane Austen
Emma
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility

Jack London
Call of the Wild
White Fang

These are just a few of the “classic collections” available on Kirtasbooks. There are so many more great titles from literary greats such as Alexandre Dumas, Cervantes, James Fenimore Cooper, Lewis Carroll, Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton and so many more! I hope you’ll check out Kirtasbooks.com today!

“Stewardship of America’s Legacy: Answering the Call to Action,” was the fourth and final session I attended in Buffalo, N.Y., and it explored how committed individuals, ranging from small town librarians to directors of national conservation training programs, can work together to improve collections care and to inspire and inform others, both nationally and in their communities.

So, what did I learn? Passion for your cause and building and sustaining relationships to support that cause are what matter when looking for support for your organization. Was this a surprise? Of course not. Don’t we all learn early in our careers that it’s never what you know but who you know?

There were, however, some surprising statistics Clotilde Perez-Bode Dedecker, president of the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, cited from a report compiled by Giving USA.

Did you know that in 2008 83 percent of charitable contributions came from individuals and bequests? 83 percent! The remainder came from foundations and corporations.

Also part of the study; what is the number one reason an individual contributes to a cause? Because they were asked or presented with the opportunity for giving!

Presenter after presenter emphasized the significance of relationships, and not just building them but also sustaining them…which speaks to the final point in the Giving USA study: 60 percent of those who STOPPED giving to a charitable organization attributed their behavior to no longer feeling connected to the cause.

The bottom line? Even as the country’s economic woes continue, people who share your passion still want to help out and contribute, but you have to ask! In order to gain that support you need to have a well thought out plan and the ability to carry it out.

You also need to remember those people once they’ve contributed! It’s always easy to reach out, contact people, and network while you’re looking for help, but don’t abandon those people once they’ve stepped up for you! Keep them engaged and grateful that they’re part of your organization and efforts.

This is significant on several levels to us; the most obvious being the recognition for our hard work and loyal customers. Kirtas’ appearance on this for the second year is also significant for what it says about the book digitization landscape. This is a true testament to the growth of this market and the need for high-quality digitization systems and services.

Read more in our Press Release and learn more on Inc. 500 Web site.

There are three models in the KABIS family available to meet the digitization needs of any organization, whether it is a small library with limited needs and budget or a large service bureau requiring mass digitization.

You can read the KABIS press release from ALA where the new systems debuted, or read the data sheet with more information and detailed specifications.

Since the invention of the written word, mankind has recorded our history one event at a time by writing it down. As a result, man has spent countless hours poring over cave drawings, scrolls and manuscripts in hopes of learning from those who had the foresight to record the events that were important to them in their microcosm of time.

Technologies developed in the last half of the 20th century have provided us with the unique opportunity to not only record the vast knowledge accumulated in the world’s library through digitization, but to make that information available to the world via a plethora of delivery methods.

Think of the possibilities–what if all the world’s medical research journals could be digitized and made available to today’s researchers in a data set allowing them to cross reference modern medical techniques with Tupachiy, the ancient Peruvian alchemy of gathering and mixing the herbs and different elements, thus creating a specific treatment for each individual and malady?

There are a myriad of simultaneous scanning programs digitizing books, newspapers, family records and the like, most of these programs are executed under the guise of sharing knowledge when in actuality, they are in fact digitizing mountains of content to further their own interests.

Google is scanning millions of books with a number of libraries around the world, in hopes of making that content searchable through the Google search engine and ultimately profiting by the sale of the books. Amazon has their own digitization program, making snippets of books viewable through Amazon.com solely for the purpose of selling books online, and repurposing the book and selling it exclusively through their eBook reader the Kindle.
Google’s efforts although monumental in size, have fallen far short when it comes to quality. Their efforts being centered on their search engine are not concerned with capturing all the information contained within the books they are currently digitizing. Scholar after scholar has expressed their disappointment with Google’s efforts. Researchers are finding numerous pages missing, pages folded over, poorly executed OCR rendering the information woefully incomplete.

It’s baffling to me that quality isn’t more important when it comes to the digitization of recorded history. I shudder to think where we would be today if Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium had every third page removed before it went to print. Man most likely would have never set foot on the moon. Copernicus’s recorded theories had immense influence on later thinkers of the scientific revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton.

We owe it to our children and future generations to digitize all the world’s printed history at the highest quality available, not only for today’s technologies, but for technologies not yet even conceived, let alone invented.

In the 18 months I’ve been with the company, it’s amazing to see how book scanning and digitizing have gone from a “nice to have” to a necessity. The need to to preserve hundreds of years worth of books, manuscripts, academic journals, legal documents, and records grows by the day. And while preservation and access are driving forces behind many digitization efforts, Sony and Amazon have done their part to make digitization relevant and digital books mainstream driving the demand even more.

We hope that you’ll be able to get to know us better. And of course, we hope you’ll help us get to know you better! We’ll also be introducing you to other Kirtas team members and sharing some unique and interesting stories about what we’ve encountered in our time at Kirtas and why we love what we do!