六级阅读材料：A global digital library has stocked 1.5 million books, 500,000 more than its initial goal, said Chinese scientists participating in the project.
The Million Book Project was started in 2002 by ambitious architects and librarians in China and the U.S., who had the lofty goal to make all published works available on-line at no cost. It has been renamed Universal Digital Library.
Zhu Haikang, deputy curator of the Zhejiang University library in Hangzhou, one of the leading institutions in the project, said about 1.5 million books -- about 70 percent in Chinese -- had been scanned, a little more than one percent of all of the world's books.
He said about 7,000 books were being scanned daily by more than 1,000 workers worldwide, marching towards its new target of 10 million books.
The project was led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in eastern China, the Indian Institute of Science and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt. Swedish and German institutions have also joined the project, Zhu said.
Architects claimed the project represented "the world's largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books."
"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library," said Raj Reddy, a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon in a statement.
"This project brings us closer to the ideal of the 'universal library,' making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language, said Reddy, who spearheaded the project.
Although the long-term goal of the Universal Library is to make books, artwork and other published works available on-line for free, about half of the current collection remained under copyright. In addition, only 10 percent or less of the publications could be accessed at no cost, the statement said.
Pan Yunhe, the China project leader, said protecting and preserving the texts was a major goal. "Paper gets old and brittle, so books soon become so delicate that no one can read them without damaging them," said the former Zhejiang University president, now vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
"Artwork fades. But once we have digitized texts and illustrations, we can keep them in circulation indefinitely. By storing them at multiple sites, we can minimize the risk that they be destroyed, as occurred in Alexandria."
Most of the work so far, including scanning, has been carried out by wo
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