Hey Lars,
On 20-Jul-2012, at 7:50 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
The way the collaboration is set up, the room is
provided
by the University of Toronto, but the equipment and staff
belong to the Internet Archive. The participating libraries
around Canada decide which books to digitize and pay a
small fee to the Internet Archive for scanning them.
That sounds awesome! If the
book is related to biodiversity, though, it might be easier to ask the Biodiversity
Heritage Library to scan it for you -- they take requests (see
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/Feedback.aspx), have access to multiple libraries across
the US, support multiple languages, and all their content is mirrored to the Internet
Archive. I don't know if they'd be as fast as the Internet Archive in Toronto,
though! Full disclosure: I'm doing a project with the BHL over the summer.
This opens up an interesting opportunity. If we want
a
particular book to be digitized, and we can find it in
the library catalogs of the University of Toronto, it
might be possible (in theory, at least) for us to present
this wish and perhaps provide the money needed, either
directly from the Wikimedia Foundation, or its chapters.
Canada is a country with many immigrants and the library
system has books in many languages.
This brings me to the question: Which books would be the
most important to scan, to help Wikipedia?
Here are some possibilities from the
English Wikisource:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Requested_texts -- that page
also has interwiki links to the other Wikisources as well.
All the best with your wishlist!
cheers,
Gaurav