What: A reception to celebrate the digitization of Sherif D. El Wakil’s Processes and Design for Manufacturing
When: Monday November 30, 2009 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM
Where: Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, Claire T. Carney Library (East side of)
Note: Visitors should use parking lot 13.

Digitization of El Wakil Text  Processes and Design for Manufacturing To Be Recognized

The Archives and Special Collections of the Claire T. Carney Library, in conjunction with the College of Engineering, will host a reception to celebrate the digitization of Processes and Design for Manufacturing by Sherif D. El Wakil on Monday November 30, 2009 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM in the Prince Henry Society Reading Room of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives.

The second edition of this text, published in 2002, provides “comprehensive and in-depth coverage of manufacturing processes from the standpoint of the product designer.  Reflecting a growing need in industry and education for ‘design-driven’ instruction, El Wakil demonstrates the importance of considering the selection of manufacturing method early in the design process, illustrating how the selection of method directly affects the geometric characteristics of products.  Beginning with a study of the design process itself, readers are taken through the product development process. Processes and Design for Manufacturing provides engineers and product designers with a solidly quantitative, design-driven discussion of manufacturing processes that supports a systems approach to manufacturing.”

El Wakil has generously allowed the Claire T. Carney Library to digitize and make its content available  free of charge, through the Internet Archive (https://www.archive.org).  As a member of the Boston Library Consortium, the library has contributed 381 titles to the Internet Archive for scanning, through the Open Content Alliance.  Most of the books have been out of copyright (pre-1923 titles), but a selection of important titles, including this one, have been scanned with the author or copyright holder’s permission.

The Boston Library Consortium, Inc., a regional consortium of  libraries, established a partnership with the Open Content Alliance to build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 18 of its member institutions.  The BLC was the first large-scale consortia to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the OCA.  The BLC’s digitization efforts have been based at the Northeast Regional Scanning Center, managed by the Internet Archive and based at the Boston Public Library.  By working through the consortia, costs for scanning have been kept low, at only ten cents per page.

The BLC, founded in 1970, is an association of academic and research libraries located in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, dedicated to sharing human and information resources to advance the research and learning of its constituency.

The Open Content Alliance represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c) (3) non-profit that was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.  According to Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, “Fortunately many great libraries are weighing the alternatives and choosing to go open instead of putting public domain material under perpetual restrictions.”

Of the 381 titles digitized from the Claire T. Carney Library’s general and special collections, they total 136,251 pages, and have been downloaded over 35,000 times.  Titles include early local histories, textile technology manuals, local city directories, and other rare books too fragile to circulate, but now freely available for researchers to access from anywhere with an internet connection.

Sherif El-Wakil’s book has been downloaded and viewed over 1,200 times in the past year.

Visitors should use parking lot 13.  The Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives is located on the East side of the Claire T. Carney Library.