PERSONIUS maintained that the CLASS Project presents an opportunity to introduce people to books as digital images by using a paper medium. Books are returned to the shelves while people are also given the ability to print on demand--to make their own copies of books. (PERSONIUS distributed copies of an engineering journal published by engineering students at Cornell around 1900 as an example of what a print-on-demand copy of material might be like. This very cheap copy would be available to people to use for their own research purposes and would bridge the gap between an electronic work and the paper that readers like to have.) PERSONIUS then attempted to illustrate a very early prototype of networked access to this digital library. Xerox Corporation has developed a prototype of a view station that can send images across the network to be viewed. The particular library brought down for demonstration contained two mathematics books. CLASS is developing and will spend the next year developing an application that allows people at workstations to browse the books. Thus, CLASS is developing a browsing tool, on the assumption that users do not want to read an entire book from a workstation, but would prefer to be able to look through and decide if they would like to have a printed copy of it. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DISCUSSION * Re retrieval software * "Digital file copyright" * Scanning rate during production * Autosegmentation * Criteria employed in selecting books for scanning * Compression and decompression of images * OCR not precluded * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ During the question-and-answer period that followed her presentation, PERSONIUS made these additional points: * Re retrieval software, Cornell is developing a Unix-based server as well as clients for the server that support multiple platforms (Macintosh, IBM and Sun workstations), in the hope that people from any of those platforms will retrieve books; a further operating assumption is that standard interfaces will be used as much as possible, where standards can be put in place, because CLASS considers this retrieval software a library application and would like to be able to look at material not only at Cornell but at other institutions. * The phrase "digital file copyright by Cornell University" was added at the advice of Cornell's legal staff with the caveat that it probably would not hold up in court. Cornell does not want people to copy its books and sell them but would like to keep them available for use in a library environment for library purposes. * In production the scanner can scan about 300 pages per hour, capturing 600 dots per inch.