BnF (National Library of France) Signs Deal With Jouve to Digitize 70,000 Books a Year

From a News Release:

The Jouve Group will work in partnership with Safig, Diadéis and the subcontractor BancTec, to digitize more than 70,000 works per year [it’s a three year deal] of which around 70% will come from the print collections of the BnF and 30% from the collections of partner libraries. Financed by the Centre national du livre, the agreement has been agreed for a three year period, renewable for one year after.

The previous agreement was signed in 2007 with a Safig-BancTec-Diadéis partnership. It allowed the digitization and OCR (optical character recognition) of 36.6 million pages.

The new deal will offer very high standards of quality: 400 DPI resolution, digitization in colour or greyscale, a minimal guaranteed OCR standard of 98.5% for documents produced after 1750, and 20% of documents digitized with high quality OCR (99.9%). In addition, at least 10% of documents will be provided in an ePub version, compatible with mobile e-readers.

The documents will enrich Gallica, the BnF’s digital library (gallica.bnf.fr).

Here’s a mechanical translations of  a ZDNet story about the BnF digitization deal.

Via Google Translate

We Learn:

Google was originally approached to do the digitization

The deal with Jouve is for three years/210,000 Books

The digitized books will use the ePub format

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