By Tim Ferguson, 27 September 2007 10:00
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, and silicon.com paid a visit to the digitisation studio at the British Library in London.
When the imaging team is running at full capacity it processes one and half trolleys of books - like the one above - per day.
Photo credit: Tim Ferguson
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1. Graham Coles
So, am I being naive in assuming that the British Library with their public funding won't be producing another BBC style fiasco (like the 'designed to be platform independent' player that requires Windows XP and internet explorer!)
I hope I'm wrong, after all, this could be done trivially with some decent html and a universal standard graphic format like png or jpeg. Should take no effort at all in producing a website viewable with firefox on any platform.
So, after witnessing the BBC disaster, I'll await the 'must be viewed with IE nine and three quarters with media player seventeen and Vista SP1' with some crappy low-res thumbnails for anyone stupid enough to be using anything else.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong and being unjustly cynical. Only time will tell ...