Frankenbooks Issues

Page Title

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has been digitizing volumes from our participating libraries for over 18 months. The general process and procedure is to scan, cover to cover, the books as they are found in the library.

As part of the ongoing improvement in the scanning process, BHL now has the ability to insert missing pages that were inadvertently missed during the scanning process. This technical capability has raised an important issue about which the BHL libraries would like the input from the taxonomic community, namely, the creation of so-called "Frankenbooks".

In some instances, a library may have a copy of a book that is missing pages or have pages that are in poor condition; these same pages are available in another incomplete copy located in the same or different library. The new scanning technology would allow for BHL to scan part of one book and then insert the missing pages from ANOTHER book (hence the Frankenstein analogy). In some cases, it is cheaper or more efficient to follow this process in place of scanning the complete copy of the book.

Though this is technically feasible, it raises a number of issues:

• Would a digital book comprised of pages from separate physical books be valid in the eyes of the taxonomic community?
• Are there any instances where such a "Frankenbook" would be acceptable to the taxonomic community?
• If the "Frankenbooks" were created, what level of bibliographic information would the taxonomic community need to verify which pages came from what book (e.g. would a general note on the title level be acceptable? would each page have to indicate which copy it came from? etc.)

The goal of the BHL is to provide the best possible and most trusted resources to the taxonomic community and your input on this question is greatly apprecited.

Please contact Tom Garnett (garnettt@si.edu) with any thoughts on the matter.

Thank you,
Tom Garnett