Students who pass through the University of Toronto's main library may never make it up to the building's seventh floor. But plenty of Web-surfing scholars have already benefited from the work that goes on there: For 14 hours a day, employees sit scanning public-domain works for the Internet Archive.
The archive, Brewster Kahle's nonprofit repository for all things digital, has now made about 200,000 books freely available online, and about 44,000 of those titles have come from the Toronto library, according to the Toronto Star. The digitized books include some seminal, widely read volumes — like The City of God, Saint Augustine's fifth-century theological tract.
But much of the material that gets scanned is more esoteric, according to Gabe Juszel, who oversees the digitization project. "We blow the dust off books that have been sitting on the shelves," he tells the Star. –Brock Read
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