Old and new media meet in British Library

One of the world’s oldest institutions of research makes an effort to embrace the digital wave.

Old and new media meet in British Library

With Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, now reporting greater sales of e-books than traditional print copies, the movement to digitise the world’s estimated 130 million print titles is gaining steam.

The British Library in London has an extensive collection of tens of thousands of rare and out-of-print works. Recently, it unveiled new touchscreen displays, a new website, and an iPad app that will give visitors access to 60,000 of those titles.

As well as the ingestion of books into its digital system, the library will also begin work on a new assignment to digitise the content of 19th-century British newspapers, a project that will add some 40 million pages to its growing database of digitised content.

Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee reports from London.

Source: Al Jazeera