In an announcement made earlier this month, the British Library and Google made public their joint agreement to allow the Google Books scanning service access to over 200,000 volumes from the British Library. This will encompass over 40 million pages of out-of-copyright material. While Google recently experienced a major setback to its scanning projects with the failure of the author settlement, the prospect of free access to some of the British Library’s unique materials is creating excitement in the digital libraries and digital humanities communities.
The British Library’s Turning the Pages project was one of the first online projects to offer readers exceptionally high-quality scans, allowing researchers to zoom in far enough to see penstrokes in Jane Austen’s original manuscripts, for example. Given the experience both sides of the agreement have in digitizing and making material available to researchers online, it will be interesting to see what becomes of this new proposal.
Selection will be done by the Library and Google jointly and the digitized content will be available through both websites. According to the Library’s press release, among the first volumes to be digitized will be feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to documents concerning the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775).
The MHL looks forward to seeing the fruit of this collaboration as the Library and Google move forward in their new partnership and, as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!