On the top floor of the Wellcome Library, 12 people sit in the darkness of blackout blinds, illuminated by the white LEDs of a scanning machine.
This is the Euston Scan Centre, currently home to a team from the Internet Archive. They are part of an ambitious project to digitise the 19th century book collections of 10 UK libraries relating to the topic of medicine. They each aim to scan 800 pages an hour. They‘ve scanned over 2.5 million since they started with a full staff in October, and will have done 16-17 million by 2016.
Scanning Books
Awesome!