PALNI’s 2020 Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant, Collaboratively Preserving Rare Scholarship in Religiously Affiliated Libraries: PALNI Last Copies is has officially wrapped! We exceeded our goal of digitizing 240 books, with a total of 446 scarcely held titles contributed from 22 PALNI institutions.
View the collection here: https://archive.org/details/palnilastcopies
(post continues after image)
Project Highlights:
- April 2021: Scanning continued
- May 2021: Project budget revision enables additional scanning of hymnal collection
- June 2021: All scanning concluded!
- July 2021: Discovery strategy defined, including: Share with Indiana Memory & DPLA; Create new ebook records and a global Knowledge Base collection
- August 2021: Project included in the Atla Digital Library!
Project Evaluation
- We’ve scanned a total of 446 books, containing 108,846 pages, and 20 foldouts.
- The collection has been viewed 5,072 times (a 744% increase since March!).
- Top viewing regions from the last 30 days are 1) California, 2) Virginia, 3) Hunan, China, 4) Indiana, and 5) Germany.
- An account of the Vedas : with numerous extracts from the Rig-Veda, from Manchester University, has been viewed the most — at 154 times since uploaded on March 19, 2021.
- Most titles are accessible from the first page of results in a Google search.
Next Steps
Now that the project is officially over, there are just a few activities to wrap up, some ongoing work to do, and the potential for new directions.
- We will complete the CONTENTdm collection and work with the Indiana State Library to share metadata with Indiana Memory and DPLA.
- As an ongoing project, we will continue to create ebook catalog records and complete any metadata cleanup needed in Internet Archive identified through that process.
- Finally, we may explore potential scholarly publishing activities such as digital scholarship projects, digital exhibits, the creation of open educational resources, and research around resource scarcity.
Many thanks to PALNI-supported institutions for their participation in PALNI Last Copies, and to our partners at Internet Archive and Atla!
This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, administered by the Indiana State Library.
