British Library To Upload 100,000 Historic Texts To The Web

While I much prefer to thumb through tangible pieces of papyrus and its modern equivalent, paper, than volumes of digital text projected on computer screens, I’m nonetheless thrilled to hear word that the British Library, a very fine institution with lots and lots of literature in its catalogue, is proceeding with plans to archive over 100,000 historic texts - all of which have been thus far unavailable for public perusal - to a Web-friendly format, which the library will then upload to “the cloud” to be accessed by all.

The main intention of the project is to help teachers gain access to important information more easily.

The effort is clearly a majestic one. One-hundred thousand is no small sum to be converting to binary, a process that will take roughly 2 years to complete. Those overseeing the digitization of the archive estimate that 50,000 pages will be scanned every day when they hit “full production.”

When all is done, the massive collection will occupy some 30 terabytes of storage. The texts will join a list of “other early historic printed books which the British Library has already made available for viewing online through previous projects.

And the entire supply will indeed be very useful. Every volume will be “fully text searchable,” according to the BBC, “meaning users will be able to look for keywords within a publication, making research easier and enhancing interaction with the material.” I don’t know about “enhancing interaction,” but keyword searches sure beat physical thumb-on-paper work, no doubt.

And interestingly enough, the converted texts will first be made available to the public not on the British Library’s website, but on Microsoft’s Live Search Books catalogue. Which is perfectly alright, as it means more access for more people.

If you’re curious to know why Google hasn’t been tapped for the project, you’ll need to venture elsewhere for such knowledge. We’ve no clue. It could have something to do with Google’s being occupied with conversion processes at the universities of Stanford, Harvard, and Michigan, in the US, as well as those involving the New York Public Library and Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Seems fair that Microsoft should be let in on some of the action, don’t you think?