Google To Digitize, Make Available British Library's Historical Holdings

pbahra writes with part of an excellent story at the WSJ: "The British Library today announced its first partnership with Google, under which Google will digitize 250,000 items from the library's vast collection of work produced between 1700-1870. The Library, the only British institution that automatically receives a copy of every book and periodical to go on sale in the United Kingdom and Ireland, joins around 40 libraries worldwide in allowing Google to digitize part of its collection and make it freely available and searchable online, at books.google.co.uk and the British Library website, www.bl.uk. ... As well as published books, the 1700-1870 collection will also contain pamphlets and periodicals from across Europe. This was a period of political and technological turmoil, covering much of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the introduction of UK income tax and the invention of the telegraph and railway. All of these topics are covered, as are the quirkier matters of the day, such as the account, from 1775, of a stuffed hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange."

Re:Not the only one...

[Geeky]

Interesting, as it's covered by law in the UK. I wonder how it would apply to self-published books, such as books sold through the likes of Blurb or Lulu.

Those companies are not UK based, so are not covered by the legislation. However, if I (as a UK resident) published a book, for sale to the public, via Lulu, would I be classed as publisher in terms of this legislation?

Re:great!

[martin-boundary]

Brilliant is a tall order. Judging from the quality of the scans of old books that are available on Google already, this will be a waste of time.

Older documents and books are notoriously difficult to scan - as it gets old, the paper starts to disintegrate and the ink fades away, and because the books are valuable, people have to be much more careful how they open and handle them.

Bottom line is that old books need to be scanned at much higher resolution AND the blotches and broken characters have to cleaned up much better than when scanning from the last decade only. Google won't do that - they're more interested in quantity and speed rather than quality.

I expect most of the books will be unusable and will have to be redone at some point in the future. I don't know why they bother (*).

(*) British Library, that is.