National Library of Norway Makes Digital Copies to Share with Norway
December 17, 2013
The article titled Norway is Digitizing All Its Books and Making Them Free to Read on The Verge explains the effort by the National Library of Norway to make each and every book searchable and readable online for people with Norway IP addresses, this measure even for the oldest texts in the collection, which date back to the Middle Ages. The article states,
“It’s similar to the mass digitization efforts in the UK and Finland, but Norway has taken the extra step of making agreements with many publishers to allow anyone with a Norway IP address to access copyrighted material. The library owns equipment for scanning and text structure analysis of the books. It’s also adding metadata and storing the files in a database for easy retrieval.”
Begun in 2006, librarians have estimated that the entire project of digitizing will take between 20 and 30 years. It is questionable whether this online library will affront publishers, but in the article none are consulted. Much of the texts would no longer carry copyrights, like public records and historical documents, but the library also contains content of all media published. If Google was sued for merely trying to make books searchable online but not even supplying the entire contents of the texts, it seems likely that Norway will certainly face some opposition to their project.
Chelsea Kerwin, December XX, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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