Google has now made agreements with the Austria National Library to digitize their 400,000 out-of-copyright books. This should be of significant help to those of us doing European research. Very exciting! Following is a teaser from the article found at “The Economic Tmes.”
VIENNA: Austria’s national library said on Tuesday it has struck a 30-million-euro deal with US Internet giant Google to digitise 400,000 copyright-free books, a vast collection spanning 400 years of European history.
Johanna Rachinger, the head of the ONB library, hailed what she called an “important step,” arguing at a news conference that “there are few projects on such a scale elsewhere in Europe.”
The Austrian library project concerns one of the world’s five biggest collections of 16th- to 19th-century literature, totalling some 120 million pages, the ONB said in a statement.
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Scanning work is to begin in 2011 in Bavaria in southern Germany, and is expected to last around six years.
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Google will not have exclusive use of the scanned books, which will be accessible on the ONB’s website www.onb.ac.at, the Google Books library at books.google.fr and its European counterpart www.europeana.eu, Rachinger said.
