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Visit the British Library’s ‘Harry Potter’ exhibit from your sofa
Assuming your Hogwarts letter got lost in the mail (it happens from time to time) and you still want a peek at The Boy Who Lived's coursework, Google has you covered. The search juggernaut has digitized the British Library's "Harry Potter: A History of Magic" exhibit and tossed it on the Google Arts & Culture mobile-and-web app.
British Library exhibit to highlight the sounds it’s fighting to save
Last year, the British Library began the "Save our Sounds" project, with the aim of accelerating the digitisation of millions upon millions of lost audio recordings held in its vast archive. The collection includes many rare and previously unreleased recordings of everything from speeches and music to wildlife, street sounds and pirate radio broadcasts. In some respects, it's a race against the clock. Time is taking its toll on ancient formats like the wax cylinder, for example, and the equipment needed to play some formats is extremely hard to come by. There's much to be done, but next month the British Library is celebrating achievements thus far with a free exhibition that "will explore how sound has shaped and influenced our lives since the phonograph was invented in 1877."
British Library digitizes George III's massive map collection
King George III was quite the map collector, and his massive catalog of cartographic relics is being digitized by the British Library. In total, the collection encompasses over 50,000 maps, including the Klencke Atlas which is the second largest atlas in the world. It measures 1.8 x 2.3 meters (about 6 x 7.5 feet) and includes 41 maps bound together in a single book. The library is a quarter of the way through photographing the collection, and once it's finished, the maps will be accessible online through its Transforming Typography website.
Edward Snowden helped embroider a Wikipedia page, for art
Magna Carta is regarded as one of the foundation documents of western democracy, and its 800th birthday is coming up next month. That's what prompted prize-winning artist Cornelia Parker to recruit some famous names, including Edward Snowden, to celebrate the creation of the document in a very unique way. Rather than re-create the original document, Parker decided to go off in a slightly different direction, by hand-stitching a version of the Wikipedia page on the topic. Sorry, what?
British Library's web domain archive is now available, just not on the web
If you need an illustration of the problems with overly stringent copyright laws, look no further than the British Library. The institution has just made its archive of UK website domains available to the public, but you can't actually visit it from the web -- the Legal Deposit Libraries Act requires that you stop by one of six libraries in the country to take a look. While reforms may be coming, the British Library says there are concerns that site operators could lose revenue if people flock to the historical collection instead of active pages. Whether or not there's any merit to that fear, those who can't swing by a reading room are largely out of luck. The British Library runs a permission-based web archive, but its roughly 13,000 sites pale in comparison to the billions stored in the offline repository. [Image credit: British Library]
British Library to archive every UK digital publication from tomorrow
If you were ever paranoid that your employer was reading your social media missives, imagine being the subject of some future student's grad school thesis. From tomorrow, Britain's six biggest libraries will be entitled to crawl and archive the web in an attempt to create the UK's official digital repository -- in the same way the sextet must receive a copy of every book, newspaper and magazine published in the motherland. The first crawls will begin in the next few weeks, and your drunken holiday photos could be accessible from terminals in the British Library, national libraries of Wales and Scotland as well as the Bodleian, Cambridge University and Trinity College libraries from as early as the end of this year. As far as we're concerned, we're hoping those long forgotten Livejournal entries will be packed off to Leeds, where the British Library's unloved texts go to sit on a shelf die.
British Library digitizes 300 years worth of newspaper archives, brings 65 million articles online
Britain's historical news junkies are in for a treat today, because the British Library has just digitized a major chunk of its newspaper archive, comprised of four million pages spanning some 300 years of headlines. With today's launch of the British Newspaper Archive, users can search and browse through a staggering 65 million articles from a range of regional UK papers, encompassing the most newsworthy events from the past few centuries. Developed in coordination with online publisher Brightsolid, the archive also allows for remote article access and download, saving researchers a trip to the British Library's newspaper depository in North London. The initiative seems similar to some we've seen from the Library of Congress in recent years, though the archive isn't completely open to the public. Users can search the site for free, but will have to pay a subscription fee to download any article as a PDF. And, expansive as the selection may be, Brightsolid and the Library are aiming to digitize a full 40 million pages over the course of the next decade. Nevertheless, today's arrival marks an important first step for the British Library and, in a larger sense, British history -- on both individual and collective levels. "For the first time people can search for their ancestors through the pages of our newspapers wherever they are in the world at any time," Ed King, head of the library's newspaper collection, told the Telegraph. "But what's really striking is how these pages take us straight back to scenes of murders, social deprivation and church meetings from hundreds of year ago, which we no longer think about as we haven't been able to easily access articles about them." Be sure to check out the archive at the source link below, and be prepared to lose your entire afternoon in the process.
British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
Oh paper, ye olde guardian of human wisdom, culture, and history, why must you be so fragile and voluminous? Not a question we ask ourselves every day, admittedly, but when you're talking about the British Library's extensive collection of tomes from the 18th and 19th century, those books, pamphlets and periodicals do stack up pretty quickly. Thankfully, Google's book digitization project has come to the rescue of bewildered researchers, with a new partnership with the British Library that will result in the availability of digital copies of works from that period -- spanning the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of the telegraph, and the end of slavery. In total, some 250,000 such items, all of them long out of copyright, will find a home on Google Books and the British Library's website, and Google has even been nice enough to bear the full cost of transforming them into web-accessible gems of knowledge. Jump past the break for the similarly digital press release.
Put a thousand books from the British Library on your iPad for free
I just love finding apps like this, and I think you'll be excited too. The British Library has released 1000 books from its 19th Century collection into a free iPad app that includes novels, historical works, poetry, philosophy and scientific books. The books have been scanned in high resolution and color so you can see the engraved illustrations, the beauty of the embossed covers, along with maps and even the texture of the paper the books were printed on. You can search the collection, browse titles by subject, and even read commentary on some of the titles. The books can be downloaded for reading offline. %Gallery-126197%
British Library packs its least requested items into new, robot-operated facility in Leeds
The British Library's just taken the wraps off a new facility up in Leeds where they'll now house some lesser used items (things like patent specs and Martin Amis' diner receipts). The new digs are a £26 million (that's about $43 million) building in West Yorkshire controlled by seven robot operators capable of pulling items and taking them to a retrieval area when they've been requested by librarians. Hit the BBC Source link to check out the futuristic system for yourself.
