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Google To Digitize, Make Available British Library's Historical Holdings
pbahra writes with part of an excellent story at the WSJ: "The British Library today announced its first partnership with Google, under which Google will digitize 250,000 items from the library's vast collection of work produced between 1700-1870. The Library, the only British institution that automatically receives a copy of every book and periodical to go on sale in the United Kingdom and Ireland, joins around 40 libraries worldwide in allowing Google to digitize part of its collection and make it freely available and searchable online, at books.google.co.uk and the British Library website, www.bl.uk. ... As well as published books, the 1700-1870 collection will also contain pamphlets and periodicals from across Europe. This was a period of political and technological turmoil, covering much of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the introduction of UK income tax and the invention of the telegraph and railway. All of these topics are covered, as are the quirkier matters of the day, such as the account, from 1775, of a stuffed hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange."
What will Apple and Facebook do? They can't afford a British literature gap!
This is not the only British library that gets all publications, The National Library of Wales (http://www.llgc.org.uk/) also gets all publications that are published in the UK (and there is likely one also in Scotland)
metageek
More to the point, what did the Princes of Green, Red, White and Mauve think? And what about the Marquis of Heliotrope?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Put in your cabinet of curiosities of course, and show to visitors. What else would you ever do with it? The title Prince of Orange is held by the crown prince of the Netherlands. It refers to the french city called 'Orange'. The title still exists, but is not a claim of any sort on the city of Orange, which is part of France. See wikipedia for the rather strange history of the term
I worked at company that did the same for the French National Library, about fifteen to eighteen years ago. To go through your questions:
We had a mix of temps and perms, mostly temp scanner operators and perm developers.
Professionals - yes, there were clauses in the contract about how much we paid if things were damaged.
Team size? Smaller than you might think - we had about ten at its peak. Around the clock - not quite, but there were definitely early and late shifts.
We used then-flash Bell & Howell scanners with expensive document feeders to avoid ripping the papers. We used Kofax image processing cards at a staggering 1Mb VRAM (yes - feel the power...) and super-powerful PCs too (486DX2 66Mhz). We stored the resulting TIFFs on a vast network server (a Network 3 1gb machine called Leviathan. Inconceivably it ran out of space so we bought a second called Behemoth). Actual process was to guillotine the books and feed them through the scanners, some books would then be restitched. In the case of rare books we'd photograph them instead (and then scan the photo - this predates digital cameras).
Yes, we then OCR'd them, and the contract stipulates that x pages in 100 have to then be proof-read.
Clearly the tech is now completely outclassed, but I'd be surprised if the contract and physical side has changed much. Am not terribly surprised to hear the British Library have taken the best part of two decades to catch up, we were talking to them at the time and they were terribly, terribly slow to see the potential in this.
Cheers,
Ian
The 18th century saw the birth of both the Industrial Age and the Age of Enlightenment. This was a time of profound change on a global scale that easily rivals the impact of our own information age.
You may ask what is the point in studying history -- who cares about the impact of steam power, for example? Here's the thing: although technology improves over time, people basically remain the same. By understanding the dislocation of farmers to factories in 1750, you can gain insight into the dislocation of national workers to global workers today.
To get access to literally every single published work from this period is going to be amazing. Bravo UK and Google!
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Calling your bluff. What state are you in?
For that to happen for free you need to declare the contents of your game system Creative Commons BY-SA which is Attribution-ShareAlike, and avoids the weird tangles regarding ad revenue vs "non commercial".
Then you have to develop the Literacy Pyramid, which is what every single copyright-clueless entity always falls into, proving that they are about the lawyers instead of the writers. The Literacy Pyramid says that you need a base of some 100 Lurkers to get about 7 Enthusiasts. But the output of Enthusiasts may not be to the standards of the Creator or the Skilled Amateur! So then you need to let 100 Enthusiasts stomp around leaving muddy tracks everywhere to get your 7 Skilled Amateurs. So every time Eric Flint whines on the Baen Free Library that "it's too expensive to digitize old works therefore they will never be republished" he's full of ...jellyBaens because it's somehow magically worth paying the lawyers afterward to sue the Enthusiasts as they stomp around.
So are you ready to do a little carpet cleaning to get your game out there?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Indeed, and the title is older than the English word "orange" itself. This was introduced to English in the early 1500's (just in time for Shakespeare to complain its lack of rhyme...), and is termed after the name for the fruit. Prior to this, the colour was "geoluhread" (yellow-red). Note, we don't call it "carrot", as (yellow-red) carrots were developed in the 1700s.
Now, the house of Orange comes from the city, originally "Arausio", in southern France. This was named for the local Celtic water God of the same name.
Being Irish, I admit I find it somewhat ironic that the "Orange-men" are originally termed for a pagan, Celtic god...
If you are in the UK, your local library should be able to get hold of copies of most British Library material for you, for quite a small fee. Yes, it's slow, and the small fees would build up if you need to access a lot of different things, but the information was already more accessible than you suggest. This is still a great step forward, though.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Possibly. In the US, the Bridgeman V Corel case decided that copies of public domain works are not copyrightable, but that of course has no bearing in the UK. There is a sense there that the ruling is reasonable, but straight up copies are definitely deemed copyrighted works thanks to (imho, inane) concepts like lighting and photogenicity. In this case, nobody's likely to complain, and surely not Google, but image copyright in the UK lies in the act of taking the photo and not generally in the creativity involved therein.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.