British Library collection to go online, thanks to Google

Google has made a deal with the British Library to make an extensive collection available online: The partnership covers non-copyrighted texts only, but will still make thousands of books available online, including text that dates back to the 18th century.

Readers will be able to search and copy text where the copyright has expired. Google has run into issues of legality in the past when it made copyrighted material available online; both the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers took issues with Google's digitization project.

Second only to the Library of Congress, the British Library collection boasts about 14 million books and some 920,000 journal and newspaper titles. One of the world's largest libraries, it is home to some 150 million items, including text in languages and from countries spanning the globe.

Britsh Library makes Google search deal [BBC]
Google teams up with The British Library to bring vast collection online [TNW]

—Maggie Shader