This New York Times article, Library’s robot is a real page-turner, available via the International Herald Tribune, describes a fascinating, ambitious, costly, technically challenging and also interesting from the perspective of fair use, project underway at the Stanford University Libraries. Using a robotic book scanner from 4DigitalBooks™, the libraries are undertaking projects to digitize their bound materials, but are also working on unbound materials as well. For more details, see this May 7 report from Stanford (pdf) – Robotic Book Scanning at the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources: Report on the Status of Digitization Facilities and Services for Bound Library Materials. In addition, here is a link to a November 26, 2001 article from the Wall Street Journal Europe on this digital robot.