Thousands of books and papers of the British Library collection will soon be made available online through a new partnership with Google.
Google and the British Library will collaborate on the digitization of 250,000 out-of-copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The British Library digital collection is expected to increase from 1.25 m to 50 elements in 2020 as it aims to find new ways for its collection accessible to scholars and members of the public, often free. Scanning texts without the help of Google's library would cost millions of pounds.
The scheme was launched by Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, at a press conference Monday morning in London.
Google Books, a venture started by the U.S. search technology company in 2004, has already scanned over 15m texts, but the scheme is bound by legal wrangling. The U. S. Ministry of Justice has yet to approve a settlement that Google has agreed to authors and publishers who sued the company in 2005, amid continuing concerns about copyright and antitrust matters.
The British Library has come to Google and several government agencies are encouraged to apply to commercial partners that public resources are squeezed. The latest project follows digitization partnerships with Microsoft, which made available thousands of 19th century books about Apple iPhone, and Bright Solid, online genealogy company, which has 40 million newspaper pages scanned.
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