Skip to main content

Google wraps it up with the British Library


Google has done it again.......by this time wrapping up a deal with the British Library to scan a huge collection of books for eventual availability on line.

cnet news reports:

Google Books has an ambitious mission statement: "Google Books is an effort to make all of the knowledge contained within the world's books searchable online."

That's a tall order, but the company will make a dent in it with a new agreement to scan 250,000 books from the British Library.

The books, pamphlets, and periodicals are all out of copyright and come from between 1700 and 1870. This is a nice companion project to the British Library's new 19th Century Books app that will eventually put thousands of old books on your iPad.

To put it in perspective, these books were generated during some famous events you may have heard of, including the French Revolution, the invention of rail travel, and the end of slavery. Google will foot the cost for this mammoth digitizing effort.
The digitized books will be available free online through Google Books and the British Library site. Readers will be able to view, copy, and share the text for non-commercial uses.

I'm most looking forward to reading "De Natuurlyke Historie van den Hippopotamus of het Rivierpaard" from 1775. That translates to "The Natural History of the Hippopotamus, or River Horse." According to the British Library, this rare tome includes the story of a stuffed hippopotamus that belonged to the Prince of Orange. Awesome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more