This summer, the McGill Library is celebrating two major milestones in digitization:

• Our entire collection of digitized volumes was added to HathiTrust.
• Our digital collections on the Internet Archive (IA) reached 6 million views.

HathiTrust: After many years of hard work and a collaborative effort between Collection Services and Digital Initiatives, the Library contributed 17,918 digitized volumes to HathiTrust. This marks a significant achievement of a long-held goal, to move our mass digitized collections from the IA into HathiTrust for increased preservation and access. Not only have we moved all our digitized volumes into HathiTrust, new workflows were also created to ingest digitized works on a regular basis using the Digital Projects Database (DPD). This incredible online tool was created by Elizabeth Thomson, (recently retired system analyst) at the Library’s in-house Application Development Team in Digital Initiatives.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions that offers millions of digitized titles from libraries around the world. During the pandemic while the Library was unavailable to onsite borrowers,  it continued to provide access to our print holdings.

In 2009-2010, HathiTrust started experimenting with ways to add support for ingesting content from the IA. This initiative enabled the Library to “batch upload” our first IA collection to HathiTrust: the popular Chapbook Collection that was published during the 18th and 19th centuries and contains over 900 British and American chapbooks. HathiTrust’s innovative approach of using existing high-resolution images from the IA saves an enormous amount of time since it is not necessary for the Library to restore archival images from its own preservation tape backups. Once the images are loaded, the HathiTrust record offers a similar experience to the IA with a full-text search component and a page-turner display option. More importantly, because of HathiTrust’s close collaboration with the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to create a permanent bibliographic catalogue, our digitized content is discoverable in McGill’s discovery tool Sofia.

The Internet Archive: This past month, the Library reached the incredible milestone of 6 million views on the IA, a non-profit digital library that provides public access to millions of digitized items. Founded in 1996, the IA (archive.org) has collaborated with more 275 Canadian institutions in providing open access to their unique materials. The McGill Library began uploading to the IA eight years ago and our collection now numbers 18,973 digitized items. Currently, the McGill Library has the following eight collections in the internet Archive:

• McGill Student Publications
• Rare Books and Special Collections
• Islamic Studies Library
• Osler Library of the History of Medicine
• McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection
• Macdonald Campus History
• Marvin Duchow Music Library
• Nahum Gelber Law

Here are some interesting facts about our IA collection that is growing by thousands of eBooks every year.

• One of our most popular items is the Magic Cookbook with over 17,000 views. It describes how Magic Baking Powder is used in baking recipes.
• The oldest digitized item in the collection is an Assyrian Medical Tablet ca. 700 BCE. It belonged to an ancient family of priests in the Temple of Aššur and it is on remedies for an eye disease that is itself unidentified in the tablet.
• The IA collection contains items in over 50 languages, including several indigenous languages such as Cree, Mi’kmaq, and Inuktitut.
• The size of the books in the collection range from a very large 3-foot atlas to a small chapbook measuring only 91 mm.
• The IA now offers the Daisy Audio format of our digitized collection for print-disabled users using specialized devices or apps.

If you wish to stay informed of new additions to our digitized collection in the Internet Archive, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed.

A big thank you goes out to our colleagues who made these milestones possible: Megan Chellew, Elizabeth Thomson, Jessica Lange, Sarah Severson (U of A), Clara Turp, Andrew Senior, Mutugi Gathuri, Mehmood Khalid, Jenn Riley and the rest of the Application Development Team in Digital Initiatives.

As 2017 comes to a close, the McGill Library has become the forefront in digitization. Not only has the library embarked on more systematic digitization projects, it has also fulfilled a record number of scan requests and added over 1,500 new digitized books to the internet archives since 2016. It is interesting to reflect on a few of the other significant accomplishments in the Digitization Lab this past year.

One important achievement was the purchase and implementation of the Quartz Suprascan, a new planetary scanner specifically designed for large format digitization of rare material.  This new acquisition made it possible to consolidate all of our equipment into one space, replacing the Better Light system that was housed in the back room of Rare Books and Special Collections. Not only has the Quartz Suprascan increased productivity because of its speed and superior level of image quality, it has also made it easier to manage large format digitization becoming a central part of the Lab. Its other innovative features include the 1:1 scanning ratio, the relief enhancing lighting, and the glare control system that enables digitization of sealed drawings in glossy mylar without reflections.

Quartz scanner in the digitization lab

Example of the 1:1 scanning ratio with some of our architectural drawings

Another area in which digitization has had a major impact is in digital exhibitions. The introduction of interactive touch tables in 2016 created a mini-boom for curated selections of digitized items. This innovative technology is ideal for showcasing digitized work by allowing users to zoom into the finer details with the push of a fingertip. Some recent examples include Vimy Ridge, an exhibit that commemorated the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge; an exhibition dedicated to the work of Robert Reid that featured over 250 pieces of his work; and the Montreal Maps exhibition, in which a hundred maps dating from between 1556 and 1946 were digitized to celebrate Montreal’s 375th anniversary.

At the start of the year, a new large-scale digitization initiative was started with the help of Collection Services. During cataloguing, any material that was published before 1896 and considered unique was brought to digitization ahead of being returned to Rare Books. This new and improved workflow opened the door to our collections and shared some incredible items from the McGill Library with the world. These items are from a range of collections including Islamic Manuscripts, Blacker-Wood, McGill Theses, and Voltaire.

Other notable digitization projects include:

• The creation of the 19th Century Sheet Music Exhibition website, a selection of music pieces that were digitized in 2015 that will be launched in January.
• The Date Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW). A project that consisted of digitizing selected ledger pages that were poorly microfilmed.
• The digitization of 85 pieces from Charles Clark’s Private Press dating from between 1820-1884 from our Colgate Collection.
• The digitization of the Osler Medical Calendars comprising 128 issues of the announcements from 1852-1986.
• The digitization of several journals, including the Railroader Weekly, the Railway Review, Public Address, and the Morgan Arboretum Annual report.
• Ongoing digitization projects include the Lande Canadiana Collection, Islamic Lithographs, and theses after 1967.
• The redesign of the digital exhibition and collections page.

Here’s looking forward to 2018 and the interesting and exciting projects that are on the horizon for the Digitization Lab.