British Library digitizing 40 million newspapers

The British Library said Wednesday it was digitizing up to 40 million pages of newspapers, including fragile dailies dating back three and a half centuries. Once digitized, the British newspapers documenting local, regional and national life spanning to the 1700s will be fully searchable and accessible online, the national library said.

The vast majority of the British Library’s 750 million pages of newspapers — the largest collections in the world — are currently available only on microfilm or bound in bulky volumes. Thousands of researchers have to make a trip to an archive building just outside London to look through them. The library said it would focus on digitizing newspapers documenting historical events in the 19th century, including the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. It also aimed to build material in the fields of family history and genealogy, as well as safeguard the future of the vast archive.

“Newspapers are designed to be read once and thrown away, so they’re very fragile,” said library spokesman Ben Sanderson. “This will be the largest mass digitization of historic newspapers the U.K. has ever seen.” The cost of the 10-year digitization project wasn’t immediately clear, but Sanderson said the process — from cleaning a single page to making a file of it — costs up to one pound ($1.40). The library’s chief executive, Lynne Brindley, said the project will help bring vital parts of history into the digital age.

“It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than traveling to a physical location,” Brindley said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i6zoKbMLfxsb6eRguAzHfsog1rFwD9FPHOL83

British Library unveils UK Web Archive

The British Library has launched its UK Web Archive to capture and record thousands of UK web sites, but has warned that the future of the project is at risk owing to copyright legislation. The project has been in development since 2004, and contains sites that would otherwise be lostd. British Library chief executive Dame Lynne Brindley said that the project had already captured and preserved 6,000 sites in an effort to avoid a “digital black hole” in UK web history. However, the project is facing difficulties as material that is freely available on the web is still subject to copyright and cannot be archived without permission from each site’s owner. Dame Brindley warned that the British Library will be able to collect only one per cent of the 8.8 million .co.uk domain address that will exist by 2011 unless the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) steps in. “We hope that the DCMS consultation will enact the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act and extend the provision of legal deposit through regulation to cover freely available UK web sites, providing regular snapshots of the free UK web domain,” she said. The issue is compounded by new research estimating that the average life expectancy of a web site is just 44 to 75 days, and that 10 per cent of all UK web sites are lost or replaced by new material every six months.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2258549/british-library-unveils-archive

Out-of-copyright classics from Dickens, Austen and the like will soon be available to download free of charge in a Microsoft-funded venture.

The British Library is to make thousands of classic 19th century works available as e-books completely free of charge.

In a joint venture with Microsoft, some 65,000 works will be offered as free downloads in the spring, with authors including the likes of Charles Dickens, Jules Verne and Jane Austen. The titles, all officially out of copyright, will be available as special digital “first editions”, complete with the original typeface and illustrations, and will significantly bolster the Library’s e-book catalogue.

Besides well-known 19th century literature, the selection will also include so-called “penny dreadfuls”, such as JM Rymer’s The Dark Woman and Black Bess by Edward Viles. Around 40 per cent of the titles on offer aren’t available in any other library. Alongside the digital titles, supporting paperback editions of many of the works will go on sale through Amazon for around £15 apiece, also featuring the original typeface and illustrations.

The announcement marks the end of a three-year process of scanning in the titles, a project funded by Microsoft. The 19th century literature was specifically chosen because it is out of copyright so can be copied freely. With the British Library officially holding at least one copy of every work of literature released in the UK, it claims that 35 to 40 per cent of its 19th century titles aren’t held by any other library.

“Freeing historic books from the shelves has the potential to revolutionise access to the world’s greatest library resources,” said Lynne Brindley, the library’s chief executive, told the Telegraph.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/620293/british-library-to-offer-65-000-free-e-books

BBC and British Library to take joint approach to building digital archive

Venture to digitise British Library’s archive of more than 150m items plus nearly 1m hours of BBC output

The BBC and the British Library are collaborating on a digital technology project to open up the institutions’ archives, with the aim of giving the public greater online access to a vast cultural treasure trove.

Under a memorandum of understanding to be signed by the two organisations today, they will collaborate on the task of provising greater digital access to the British Library’s archive of more than 150m items collected over the past 250 years, as well as nearly 1m hours of TV and radio output from the BBC, which has been broadcasting since 1922.

The BBC and the British Library will establish a joint steering committee to develop a uniform approach across the two organisations on issues including rights management, distribution of archive content, and technical issues of digitisation and storage.

“Unlocking the wealth of content in the British Library and BBC archives is a great opportunity as well as an immense challenge,” said the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, who will sign the agreement with the British Library chief executive, Dame Lynne Brindley. “It is vital we partner, harnessing the power of digital technology to give the public the access they deserve.”

Brindley said: “Through this memorandum of understanding we aim to create a model of best practice which will allow the library to develop similar opportunities with other public institutions. This partnership not only demonstrates that we are keen to share content for the benefit of today’s researchers and the knowledge economy, but also expresses our continued commitment to supporting the government’s vision of building a digital Britain.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/11/bbc-british-library-digital-archives