The British Library is working with Microsoft and imaging company Content Conversion Specialists (CCS) on a massive book digitisation project.

Over a period of two years, around 100,000 books from the British Library’s nineteenth century literature collection will be made available on its online catalogue and Microsoft’s Live Search Books.

Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be required to accommodate the project’s output.

The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete. Texts which are hard to get hold of will particularly benefit from the digitisation. For example, authors who were only ever published outside the great centres of literary life have tended not to remain in print and have often been forgotten.

Now, these authors will have a second chance to reach a readership.

“By digitising the whole collection, we give access to the books without the filter of later judgments, whether based on taste or on the economics of printing and publishing,” Dr Jensen said.

Read the full article here.

BBC - Arts - Poetry

The BBC have a selection of recordings of poets reading their on work on its ‘Poetry outloud’ website. It includes a very scratchy recording of Alfred Lord Tennyson reading ‘the Charge of the Light Brigade’ (made by Thomas Edison’s agents on wax cylinder), as well as works by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, WH Auden and others. Most of the recordings are still copyright protected; the fact that the BBC have been given permission to make them publicly available augers well for us.