From a post at the Internet Archive by Brewster Kahle:
When I talked with Carole Moore, the fantastic librarian from University of Toronto, about 6 years ago, she had a vision of scanning 250,000 books from their libraries. Well, a few days ago she succeeded. ( http://www.archive.org/details/university_of_toronto )
It has been a winding road to here, with financial help from Yahoo and Microsoft, from the Canadian government and from the University of Toronto– but she got there in grand style.
She had books from the 1400’s scanned, she has done all sorts of things with the able help from Jonathan Bengtson and Sian Meikle. The Internet Archive scanning center (our first) was started by Molly Davis and Gabe Juszel operating a cool page turning robot. The center is still run by Gabe with support from above and below and employs about 40 people.
All in all it is a hero librarian’s tale and a successful one.
250,000 books for free to the world from one of the great libraries in the world.
Go University of Toronto!
-brewster
It’s an amazing resource that includes many unexpected finds. As a genealogist, it’s amazing to find 19th century documents from Ontario history side-by-side with the usual suspects like Dickens. And 250,000 boks scanned is really quite a lot! Hopefully, the project continues!
A fantastic resource that adds yet more to the growing rediscovery and resources of everyone around the world.
One thing that is missing from this site is this. I am certain there are many many gems hidden in this huge archive. A section that draws attention to a selection each week would be fantastic rather than ordinary people having to look for specific works.