http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/how-many-texts-have-been-digitized
Es geht um den Anteil der Primär- und Sekundärliteratur einer 2002 veröffentlichten Dissertation zur US-Literaturgeschichte, der inzwischen digitalisiert vorliegt.
To find out, I searched for each of the 296 items in my original bibliography in both free and subscription-based online collections such as Google Books, Open Content Alliance/Internet Archive, JSTOR, Project Muse, Early American Fiction, Making of America, Net Library, and Questia (which requires an individual subscription). I found that 83% of my primary source materials and 37% of my secondary source materials are now available online as full-text.
Der Beitrag enthält auch aufschlußreiche Beobachtungen zu Google Book Search.
As Patrick Leary, Jo Guldi, and others have argued, massive digitization projects promise not only to make the research process more efficient, but also to open up new approaches to research. For example, you can discover important works that would otherwise be invisible to you, trace the use of a phrase across works, and analyze significant patterns in a corpus of texts.