KU Leuven Libraries will work with Google to digitise over seventy thousand books and make them accessible to the public over the next two years. Today, the first shipment of five thousand books is ready to be sent to Google , where they will be integrally scanned.
All books and collections will be freely accessible via the Google Books platform and KU Leuven's LIMO library catalogue. The collaboration follows an earlier initiative, in which KU Leuven delivered its own digitised collection to Google. More than six thousand public domain books and documents were thus uploaded and enriched with textual, searchable data.
Hilde Van Kiel, director KU Leuven Libraries, stressed the importance of the collaboration. According to her, the Google Books Digitisation project represents a monumental leap forward in terms of making collections accessible. 'If we wanted to carry out this project independently, it would take more than 99 years. Moreover, this collaboration enriches our collections with ocr data, converting the images into textual, searchable data, a great advantage for researchers. By sharing our digitised collections on the Google Books platform, we extend our reach to a global audience.