The British Library will upload 250,000 books that were published between 1700 and 1870. The books will be freely available as part of a partnership between the British Library and Google.
Among the first books will be a pamphlet about Queen Marie-Antoinette of France and the designs of one of the first submarines (1858) by the Spanish inventor Narciso Monturiol.
All the items submitted to the project were selected by the British Library and are in several European languages. They will be available on the
British Library website and
Google Books. Google is footing the bill for the scanning of what amounts to over 40 million pages. This is part of Google's on-going project to form partnerships with the best libraries in the world. So far they have partnered with more than 40 libraries including those of Stanford and Harvard Universities and libraries in the Netherlands, Rome, Florence and Austria.
I think that this is a brilliant initiative - freeing up resources that are owned by all of us.
The 250,000 documents represent a large sample of books, pamphlets and periodicals an cover a period that saw the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Battle of Trafalgar, the Crimean War, the invention of the railroad and telegraph and the abolition of slavery. None of these publications have previously been freely available on the web.
Once digitized, they will be accessible for reading, downloading, research and will be stored in the archives of the library. Everybody will have access and can copy, share and republish the material for non-commercial use.
The British Library has over 150 million documents, books, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, photographs, journals and records in all the spoken and written languages ??of the world. So there's plenty of room for the expansion of this project then!