More Full Text Books Digitized by Google Available Outside the U.S., Records Now Being Added to Oxford’s Online Catalog

From the Bodleian Library (Oxford U.):

The Oxford-Google Digitization project – established in 2004 – has reached an exciting stage in its development with the Bodleian Libraries books digitized by Google now fully available to the academic community and the general public for the first time. [Our emphasis] Much of the material that the Bodleian collaboratively digitized with Google has only been available in “snippet” or “metadata-only” view to users of Google Books outside the US.  By making the Bodleian copy of the digitized books available online, the material becomes fully available to all users in PDF format. 

This feature has proved popular since its soft launch in March of this year.  From the initial load of about 335 thousand books, users from all over the world have made already close to 60,000 downloads. The top five book downloaded in June were:

1. Cobet, C. G. (Carel Gabriel), 1813-1889 – Variae lectiones quibus continentur observationes criticae in scriptores Graecos  1873
2. Victoria Queen of Great. Britain. Edited by A. Helps.  Leaves from the journal of our life in the Highlands, from 1848 to 1861 1868
3. Sir Martin Theodore The life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort  1875-80
4. Alfred Tennyson Baron The works of Alfred Tennyson, poet laureate. 1871-1873 Volume 7
5. Robert Louis Stevenson Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1886

The popularity of three of the books listed above was correlated with the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee.

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Now the materials digitized are being added to SOLO, the online catalogue of Oxford’s collections (http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk).  Making these digitized works accessible via SOLO enables the Bodleian to provide a direct link between the digital version and the physical item scanned, which can be very important for researchers who need to work with a particular copy of a text. Moreover, the Bodleian Libraries are working on providing enhance functionality such as improved scans or better full-text searching.

The digitization process led to the creation of two digital copies of each book: one for Google, and one for Oxford. The initial phase of this work completed in the summer of 2009, with several hundred thousand of our books being scanned and made available via Google Books (http://books.google.com). The Google copy is fully indexed and searchable through the Google Book search service. The second phase of this project which links the Oxford copy directly to the relevant catalogue record in SOLO has now been completed by staff of the Bodleian Digital Library Systems & Services. Details of how to access the digitized copy via SOLO can be found at www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/dbooks.

Hat Tip/Thanks: Library Stuff

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