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British library looking for partnership to digitize its books after Microsoft pull out
Date: 06/06/2008
The British library has vowed their project to convert hundreds of thousands of books and other material into electronic format won’t be hampered by the fact their partnership with Microsoft ended last week.
The library and Microsoft agreed a partnership in late 2005 to fund the scanning of around 100,000 of 19th century books and the scanning work will continue until the final 40,000 books are finished at least. Other projects will continue such as digitization for sound recordings and newspaper scanning which have been funded from a mixture of public and private sources.
Digitisation manager Neil Fitzgerald pointed out that there can be a tendency to look at possibly negative aspects, but thinks it's worth highlighting that this has also been a positive outcome for the library. Microsoft’s exit wasn’t completely unexpected. “Commerical third parties will only maintain a resource if it fulfills their commercial imperative.” Fitzgerald said. They would now be available to negotiate with other company partnerships such as Google who have expressed interest in digitising project work.
Two weeks ago Microsoft stated it would focus its search engine development on projects with high commercial intent, such as travel. The company had a portal, called Live Book Search which is now shut down, that portal enabled users to search books from the British Library and other sources. Those books are now searchable through Microsoft's main search engine, Live Search.
The British Library contains around 150 million items, 13 million of which, are books. Scanning 100,000 books would actually count for around 0.5 percent of the library's material. The library can only scan books for which the copyright has expired and are still in a reasonable state, which counts for around 2.5 million items.
The books are scanned by automated machines that turn the pages. The APT BookScan 2400, made by Kirtas, uses a robotic arm to turn pages; around 2,400 pages can be scanned per hour. Contractors reportedly operate the machines from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. in two shifts, scanning around 75,000 pages per day.
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