Want to Read a Good Book?

By means of a mass digitization program, the British Library has planned to make available online thousands of old books previously unavailable to the public. This program is aimed at helping teachers by giving them access to 19th Century books that haven't been reprinted after their first edition and thus being very hard to get hold of. The reason for this mass digitization is as Dr Kristian Jensen, from the British Library said: "If there are no modern editions, teachers cannot use them for their courses ".

This project will require approximately 30 terabytes of storage space and at a rate of 50.000 pages scanned per working day it's expected that around 25 million pages will be scanned in the first two years of the program.

Dr. Jensen also added that: "By digitizing 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." At first, the publications will be accessible trough Microsoft's Live Search Books and then via the British Library website; but due to copyright restrictions and intellectual property issues, the agreement between Microsoft and the British Library will cover only those materials which are "public domain". "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 added.

The fact that the books are digitized will also make them text searchable which means that the users will be able to look for specific keywords within a publication, therefore making research a lot easier; moreover, this format will also enhance interaction with the material. Microsoft isn't the only one working with a renowned library. Google is also digitizing the work of other 5 libraries: Stanford, Harvard, the Michigan university libraries, the New York public library and the Bodleian library in Oxford.