More than 100,000 old books which were earlier unavailable to the public, will be available online soon because of a mass digitisation programme at the British Library. The programme focuses on 19th Century books, many of which are unknown as few were reprinted after first editions.
The library believes online access to the titles will help the teachers. It is said that 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. The new category of digitised titles will supplement other early historic printed books which the British Library has already made available for viewing online through previous projects. Digitised publications will be accessible in two ways -initially through Microsoft's Live Search Books and then via the Library's website.
