“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.

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.