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RSS feedsMicrosoft will digitise 25 million pages of out-of-copyright content held by the British Library in a major strategic partnership between the software giant and the national library. Digitised content will be available on the MSN BookSearch service and from the British Library (BL) National Digital Library next year.
The deal, which was signed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and British Library chief executive Lynne Brindley at the St Pancras site, is an extension of an existing deal between the two to develop the National Digital Library. Microsoft is developing the digital object management infrastructure for the National Digital Library.
Scanning will begin in 2006, with around 100,000 titles, which are out-of-copyright being scanned and made available on MSN BookSearch. Brindley described the deal as "great news for research and scholarship".
A spokesperson for the British Library confirmed that digitisation of the titles would be carried out by the Internet Archive, the organisation behind the Open Content Alliance, which announced in late September that it was creating a digitisation project to rival Google Print. Microsoft is a member of the Open Content Alliance alongside web search giant Yahoo.
The last two months has seen major interest in book digitisation with publishers Macmillan joining Google and the Yahoo/Microsoft Open Content Alliance in offering publishers and libraries a platform to have the books digitised onto.
Google has received a high level of flack, including legal action , from the publishing and library industry for scanning books that are still protected by copyright.
