Google to digitize British Library collection

Thousands of books and papers from the British Library’s collection will soon be made available online through a new partnership with Google.

Google and the British Library will work together to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. The British Library’s digital collection is expected to increase from 1.25 million items to 50 million by 2020, as it seeks to find new ways to open its collection to academics and members of the public, often free of charge. Scanning the texts without Google’s help would cost the library millions of pounds.