Their San Francisco presence is housed in a former Christian Science church, lending it a certain gravitas. Their enormous conference room not only has racks of drives sitting at the back, but also has a working pipe organ! (Make your own series of tubes joke here.)
Inexplicably, they are also constructing a terracotta army of avatars of their long-term employees. I assume these are to protect Brewster in the afterlife.
The racks of drives are just kind of scattered all over the place, climate control provided opening windows. Each blinkenlight is a 2TB drive. They have mirrors all over the world, so I gather it's a "use the cheapest thing possible and have a zillion backups" kind of scenario.
The book-scanning operation is pretty sweet. There's an angled backplate with a correspondingly-angled piece of glass that hinges down over it to hold the pages flat, and a pair of Canon 5D Mk 2 cameras pointing at each page. Apparently once you get into the rhythm of it, you can scan an entire book in 8 minutes. Volunteers and interns: cheaper than robots!
Random libraries (and individuals) around the world ship them crates of books, they scan them, and ship them back.
Worlds are colliding. That's how I felt reading the comments in Today in Computational Necromancy:
The Boston Public Library happens to have an Internet Archive room wherein books are digitized using that custom setup. I stumbled past it last year while wandering about the library's zillion rooms. I poked about, and had a fun conversation with the dude watching over the room that day. Cockles were generously warmed. I admire IA's work.
Where is the room?... which building?, what floor?
>"The Boston Public Library happens to have an Internet Archive room..."
May be: "BPL Digital Scanning Lab and Imaging Studio, Johnson Building, Floor 2"
(I grubbed that from a Google search. I'm not a Boston native, so YMMV; I'd suggest emailing the IA people or calling the BPL directly for exact info.)
I want one of those phones for an intercom so badly it's sickening. I'm torn between that and the submarine handsets they used in BSG...
I'm going to talk to my grandparents about doing this with their extensive library of art history, english literature, world languages, and atlases published during improbable quirks of political geography.