British Library books go digital
By Cristina Jimenez

More than 100,000 old books previously unavailable to the public will go online
thanks to a mass digitisation programme at the British Library.

The programme focuses on 19th Century books, many of which are unknown as few
were reprinted after first editions.

The library believes online access to the titles will help teachers.

"If there are no modern editions teachers cannot use them for their courses,"
said Dr Kristian Jensen, from the British Library.

"What we can read now is predetermined by a long tradition of what has been
considered great literature," he added.

At full production approximately 50,000 pages per working day will be scanned.

Project's output

Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be required to accommodate the
project's output.

The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete. Texts
which are hard to get hold of will particularly benefit from the digitisation.

For example, authors who were only ever published outside the great centres of
literary life have tended not to remain in print and have often been forgotten.

Now, these authors will have a second chance to reach a readership.

"By digitising the whole collection, we give access to the books without the
filter of later judgments, whether based on taste or on the economics of
printing and publishing," Dr Jensen said.

The new category of digitised titles will supplement other early historic
printed books which the British Library has already made available for viewing
online through previous projects.

Those are included in two commercial resources: the Early English Books Online
and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Both collections are freely available to higher education institutions in the
UK.

Other digital resources in the British Library will soon include two million
pages of 19 Century newspapers and one million pages of 18th Century newspapers.

Text searchable

Digitised publications will be accessible in two ways -initially through
Microsoft's Live Search Books and then via the Library's website.

The books will be fully text searchable, meaning users will be able to look for
keywords within a publication, making research easier and enhancing interaction
with the material.

Whereas Microsoft is working with the British Library, Google is digitising the
work of five of the world's other renowned libraries - Stanford, Harvard, and
Michigan university libraries, the New York public library and the Bodleian
library in Oxford.

Due to copyright restrictions and intellectual property issues, the agreement
between Microsoft and the British Library covers only "public domain" materials.

"We have taken great care to exclude 19th Century works by authors who died
after 1936, for there is copyright in the item for 70 yeas after the death of
the author," Jensen said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/7018210.stm

This is a GREAT use of the Internet!  

Ray

-- 
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Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious - Edna O'Brien
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