Launching the scheme at a press conference this morning in London, Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said that thousands of books and papers from the British Library’s collection will soon be made available online through a new partnership with Google. Google and the British Library will work together to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. The British Library’s digital collection is expected to increase from 1.25m items to 50m by 2020, as it seeks to find new ways to open its collection to academics and members of the public, often free of charge. Scanning the texts without Google’s help would cost the library millions of pounds.
This is in addition to the release last week of a new (and free) reading app for Apple’s iPad which offers access to over a thousand scanned 19th Century books. The Library says the app will be updated later this summer to offer more than 60,000 titles which form part of its 19th Century Historical Collection, and will provide a wealth of historical, scientific and cultural content for the researcher and more general enthusiast alike.
The full news report can be found here. Things can only get better .....
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