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European Libraries Counter Google Digitisation
headisdead writes "A week after Google substantially improved their UK site, Deutsche-Welle carry the story that the a whole host of large European libraries (with the British Library's tacit support) have joined an EU-based digitisation project as a counter to Google's own library scheme. The project is the brainchild of BNF director Jean-Noel Jeanneney, a sort of mild-mannered Jose Bove for the librarians out there. Divisive pride, or healthy competition?"
Good soundbite, but not at all true. The origins of this project are more than a decade old, and I was involved with it in 1993.
The company I worked for at the time did data capture. We won the contract to digitis French National Library - custom scanning software was written, pagination checking, QA software...the lot. This was when you needed custom graphics cards to store an largish group 4-compressed TIFF, and a lot of work went into optimising the deskewing sfotware etc.
Back then the project was called EPBF, European Biblioteqe de Francais (or Every P*ssing Book In France as one scanner operator had it), though the name later changed to just BNF (Bilbioteqe National de Francais). We were always trying to get the British Library interested too, but the dragged their heals and it's not surprising to me that it's taken them twelve years to finally get to the table.
I rather doubt this is anything to do with Google as such. It's just making better use of what they've had for years already, at least in France.
Cheers,
Ian
Umm. The copyright to Peter Pan expired a while ago. What you are talking about is that there is mandatory licensing of Peter Pan ad infinitum imposed by the government. This is outside of copyright, but is effectively the same. The resultant monies go to a children's hospital, the Great Ormond Street, which is one of the best in the world, apparently. I hardly see that paying a pittance towards curing children of cancer and so on is that terrible a thing.
There is, however, a perpetual copyright in the United Kingdom, in that the Authorised Version (which you might know better as the King James Version) of the Bible is judged to have been written by the office of the King (rather than the person); as the office hasn't died, the 'author' is still alive, and so it is still under copyright. But that's just a perculiarity of having no automatic public domain crtierion for governmental works at the time.
HTH.
James F.
The US is the longest running continuous government in the modern world.
No idea what you mean here or what relevance it has, but you do realise that Britain had a Prime Minister before the start of the US' War of Independence? (1735, Sir Robert Walpole first entered 10 Downing Street)
Also, the Brits might disagree, since their parliament history goes back to before the "new world" was discovered.