Massively Digitized: A Report on Spanish & Portuguese Literary Works

Nested within the supplemental material available freely online with the Council on Library and Information Resources' latest report released this month and titled "The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship" is a brief summary of commissioned research completed by Patricia Soler - Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University. The summary distills and presents the findings of her recent research on the quality and availability of digitized Spanish and Portuguese literary works, both in their original languages and in English translation. Her research offers a particularly valuable comparison of digitizations in Google Book Search (GBS) and the Internet Archive’s Open Access Text Archive (OATA) and is one of four disciplince-specific investigations that inform the chapter from the report by Charles Henry and Kathline Smith titled "Ghostlier Demarcations: Large-Scale Text-Digitization Projects and Their Utility for Contemporary Humanities Scholarship." Here are direct links to Soler's summary and raw data for the sample of Portuguese and Spanish digitized books she analyzed.