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.
The British Library has teemed up with Microsoft and the great thing is that they are going to be concentrating on digitising public domain books;
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,”
At present I don’t know how many of these books will already be in the PG archives but nonetheless this is going to be another great move in making all public domain books available. Hopefully these books will be accessible in full and available for inclusion in projects such PG.
You can read the full article on the BBC.co.uk website.