Google has long wanted to make the sum of human knowledge available on line and today took one more step towards that eventual aim when it announced that it had agreed a deal with the British Library in London to make available over the internet around 250 000 texts.
The texts date back as far as the 18th Century and are all out of copyright. The documents are from 1700 – 1870 and under the terms of the agreement will be available on both the British Library’s website as well as on Google Books. It is likely to take a number of years to digitise all of the works selected.
The cost of digitising all the documents will be covered by Google. The 250 000 documents to be scanned are a tiny fraction of those that the British Library houses which is in excess of 150 million items.
Although some purists may baulk at the idea of this sort of historical information being available online it will prove to be of great value to many people all over the world who will have a chance to examine documents without having to incur the expense of travelling to London. The British Library was itself set up to try to provide knowledge to everybody and this deal will help them remain true to their original roots. In many ways it is a similar ideal to that of Google. What we are seeing is a merging of old and new media.
In completing this task we move one step closer to having a universal repository of knowledge that hopefully will be able to be accessed by anybody, anywhere and at any time. I believe that sometimes being in the presence of a historical document or artefact can have an emotional impact on an individual but that should not detract from the value of this project. As time goes by these documents will become more fragile and will not be capable of being handled except with special permission meaning that only a very small number of academics are ever likely to see these documents. Digitising the documents will allow not just a lasting record of their contents to be maintained but may lead to discoveries that otherwise may have never been made through the greater accessibility to the works.
All too often history repeats itself and while I am not expecting Barrack Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy et al to read through these documents at least the documents will be available to give the people of today an insight into the world that the people of yesterday inhabited. Maybe, just maybe, we may be able to learn a thing or two from the past?