Early British Printing Meets the Electronic Age: A Large-Scale Digitization Case Study

Abstract

Imagine having at your desktop page images of books printed in English from the dawn of British hand-printing in 1475 through the English Renaissance, the tumultuous years of the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration to 1700. Picture yourself typing in a keyword such as an author's or printer's name and having the entire work, be it a one page broadside or a thousand page Bible, appear on the screen and be available to read or print. This project, perhaps the most ambitious microfilm-to-digital conversion attempted thus far, digitized over 22 million page images from ProQuest Information and Learning's