British Library goes with Google for digitisation plans

The British Library and Google have announced a partnership that will see the web giant digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the library's collections.

The content will be made available, free of charge, through Google Books and The British Library's website. Google will cover all digitisation costs.

The books, pamplets and periodicals to be digitised are dated from between 1700 and 1870, with content relating to the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War of that period.

It will include material in a variety of major European languages and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.

Once digitised, these items will be made available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the library's website and stored permanently in the library's digital archive.

Researchers, students and other users of the library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world, as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said: "Our aim is to provide perpetual access to this historical material and we hope that our collections, coupled with Google's know-how, will allow us to achieve this aim."

The British Library said the deal helps to underline its commitment to collaboration with the private sector to digitise parts of its collections.

It follows a partnership with cloud computing expert brightsolid to digitise up to 40 million pages of its newspaper collections. The British Library also recently partnered with Microsoft to digitise 65,000 19th-century books, some of which are now available as an App on Apple's iPad.

The British Library also plans to make the works available via Europeana, the European Digital Library.

Google has partnered with over 40 libraries around the world to date.