Abstract
In a public-private partnership with Google, the Austrian National Library is digitising its historical book holdings. Some 600,000 volumes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries will be digitised and made available free of charge. The project demonstrates that public-private partnerships can be successful in enabling our heritage institutions to provide large-scale access to their holdings, provided that such partnerships are not exclusive and free access is ensured. The article outlines the preparatory phase and work flows established in the project.
Highlights
In a public-private partnership with Google, the Austrian National Library is digitising its historical book holdings
For many years the Austrian National Library has been carrying out ambitious digitisation projects and it has a steadily growing offer of digital services
The Austrian National Library is actively engaged in EU-funded digital preservation research projects
Summary
Two sources are feeding into Google Books, which was initiated in 2004. In the so-called ‘partner programme’, publishers provide their books to Google to digitise and make them available online. In the ‘library programme’ Google is currently cooperating with about 40 library partners throughout the world to digitise their books; among them are thirteen libraries in Europe.[5] In cooperating with Google, the Austrian National Library is following the example of renowned libraries such as the university libraries of Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and Oxford, and the New York Public Library, which have been working with Google since 2004. As a result of partnerships with publishers and libraries more than 15 million digitised books can be searched and found via Google Books (http:// books.google.com). Unlike in the United States, Google digitises exclusively public domain works in Europe. In the ‘Google eBookstore’ around three million books are available to date, among those the public domain works from the library programme, which can be downloaded free of charge. The digitised books of the Austrian National Library will become part of Google‘s free-of-charge eBook service
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