Google will digitize the Austrian National Library

Vienna - The Internet search engine Google will digitize the content of all books from the Austrian National Library (ÖNB). This includes about 400,000 volumes that are not subject to copyright and will be accessible in full text on the web from anywhere in the world after digitization. Google is financing the digitization as part of a public-private partnership (PPP) project. This was announced today in Vienna by the library's director general, Johanna Rachinger.
   "This is the largest PPP project in Austrian culture to date, and there are very few projects of this scope even in all of Europe," said Rachinger, according to the APA agency.
    According to her, the library would not be able to afford such an initiative with its own funds. The search engine is bearing all the costs of digitization, which range between 50 and 100 euros (approximately 1280 to 2560 CZK) per book. Approximately 400,000 volumes from the 16th to the 19th century will be digitized, with the exception of exemplars that conservators might object to for preservation reasons. Nonetheless, this involves 120 million pages of text that will henceforth be freely accessible on the internet. The books will be digitized in Bavaria, where they will be gradually transported from Vienna.
    Preparatory work begins immediately, and the actual digitization will start next year; the project is expected to last six years.
    Google is currently providing access to two million volumes based on partnerships with publishers and over ten million volumes from 40 libraries worldwide, including those from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, the Bavarian State Library in Munich, and the Italian National Libraries in Rome and Florence.
    "I am convinced that digitization will also lead to new insights," said the director. It can be assumed that general accessibility will provoke interesting discoveries and new evaluations, she added. In the future, there will not only be online catalogs on the internet, but it will also be possible to search in content lists, personal registers, and full text. Another advantage of digitization is that in the case of any disaster, the contents of the works will be preserved at least in digital form.
    Google will not have any monopoly on the use of the Vienna National Library's collection, and visits to these pages will not be used for automatic navigation to Google Books pages, Rachinger stated. The current agreement also does not grant the company any rights for potential later digitization of books that are subject to copyright and similar protections.
    "This strictly concerns books that are not subject to copyright, and that will remain the case," Rachinger emphasized.
    Representatives of Google Austria expressed pride in being able to digitize the Austrian National Library and confirmed that the relevant pages will not be commercially exploited. "Still, Google will profit from this, because when Internet users find this information with us, they will hopefully use our services for other searches as well," said Annabella Weisl, project leader for German-language books at Google.