Identifying and selecting content for the Million Book Project

Abstract

This paper focuses on collection development and implementation issues and challenges of the Million Book Project (MBP), an international digital library project. The project's objective is to create a free-to-read, universally accessible million-book digital resource. The creation of this digital storehouse will also provide a test bed for research and investigation on data mining, automatic summarization, machine translation, and development and transformation of digital library tools. Initially the project had fifteen partners in China, India, and the United States. As the project has evolved, additional project participants have joined the effort. The collaboration of both old and new partners is essential to the creation a large-scale, multi-national digital library. Librarians hailing from two of the partner countries, India and the United States, will focus on collection development and content selection among partners physically separate but virtually connected.