MSN Search and British Library Partner for Book Search
Last week MSN Search announced that they wil be joining Yahoo in the Open Content Alliance book scanning and indexing efforts and now Microsoft and the British Library have formed strategic partnership to digitize 25 million pages of content from the Library’s collections. The effort will begin in 2006, and is dubbed as being ‘long term’ by the two entities.
Microsoft and the British Library will be digitizing somewhere around 100,000 public domain books and the content will be indexed in MSN Book Search, which MSN expects to launch in public beta next year. Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, said, “This partnership helps us fulfil our vision of promoting ready access to our collection for everyone who wants to use it. This is great news for research and scholarship and will give unparalleled access to our vast collections to people all over the world: they will be available to anyone, anywhere and at anytime.”
Microsoft is already working with the British Library to help build the digital infrastructure for the National Digital Library providing software tools, advice and technical support to the Librarys experts. The National Digital Library is a cornerstone of the British Library strategy launched in June this year. The Digital Object Management (DOM) system, will enable the long-term storage, preservation and access to digital items such as e-journals, e-books and CD-ROMs acquired by the Library through legal deposit. The system will use open standards, allowing the Library to adapt to future shifts in storage, preservation and access technologies
Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft : “Our partnership with the British Library is not only about digitization and preservation, but also about delivering a great experience for people accessing this amazing collection through British Library and MSN Web sites.”
