The two organizations will make the historical books, pamphlets and other periodicals available both on the library's site and on Google Books.

The project will take several years to complete and Google is to foot the bill for digitizing them, according to the BBC.

The pamphlets are particularly intriguing. They were the pre-electronic age's equivalent of blogs: getting the word out, stirring up people, introducing radical ideas, arguing political stances and more. They give the reader a window into the time as it moved for those living there, as opposed to the more measured and mythopoeic vision of books.

In the first batch to be digitized, a pamphlet on Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France who was executed in the French Revolution.

The amount accessible via this partnership is a mere drop in the library's collection, which features 14 million books, almost a million periodicals and pamphlets, 58 million patents and three million sound recordings.

Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley, of the British Library, told the BBC that "the scheme was an extension of the ambition of the library's predecessors in the 19th Century to provide access to knowledge to everyone," making the Internet the modern "reading room."

If you want to see the Sarajevo haggadah or a manuscript of Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' annotated by Siegfried Sassoon, however, you'll still have to make the trip to Euston Road.

British Library photo by Steve Cadman | other sources: ResourceBlog

Some 500,000 pages have been digitized thus far, and beginning this fall, this material will be available online. By then, the British Library hopes to have over 1.5 million newspaper pages available.

According to The Guardian, the project is a partnership with Brightsolid, an online publisher and owner of several family history websites, including ancestorsonboard.com and Genes Reunited.

Copyright Problems Persist with Digitization Efforts

Despite the British Library's vast collection of newspapers, the issue of copyright is still complex. Initially, the British Library intended to focus solely on pre-1900 newspapers so as to avoid the issue, but it's in negotiations with rights holders to move forward with 20th century content.

Last year, when the British Library began its digitization efforts, James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp (and Rupert's son) blasted the project, warning that public bodies were increasingly "treading on the toes" of commercial media organizations. He said that the digitization efforts were "not simply being done for posterity, nor to make free access for library users easier, but also for commercial gain via a paid for website."

At the time, Murdoch was very critical of Google's digitization efforts too, and as the Google Books settlement (or rather, the recent ruling to throw out the Google Books settlement) demonstrates, there are still many obstacles in the digitizing archival material - whether it's by public or private institutions.

The app includes major literary, political and musical texts: the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Charles Dickens's handwritten draft of Nicholas Nickleby, Nelson's Battle Plan written before his victory at Trafalgar, Galileo's letters, Jane Austen's teenage writings, the original Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks, and handwritten lyrics by The Beatles.

Frances Brindle, British Library Director, Strategic Marketing & Communications stresses the importance of access to the library's collections via mobile technologies. "The Library is committed to increasing access to its collections and broadening the reach of our services and this app demonstrates our commitment to engaging with the mobile community."

The iPhone and Android versions are available to download for £2.39 (US $3.99). The iPad version - in HD - will cost you £3.49 (US $5.99) There is an introductory discount for the apps that will run until January 24.

The British Library wants to map different words and accents and chart the changing pronunciation of the English language. As part of its exhibit Evolving English, the British Library is adding to its already sizable collection of 20th century recordings of the English voice, and it's asking any English speaker worldwide to record their voice reading Mr. Tickle aloud.

In order to compare accents, the British Library is examining words in lexical sets, those that share certain pronunciation patterns. According to phoneticians, reading long lists of words aloud is not ideal as it tends not to be "authentic" or conversational, so reading prose aloud is preferable. And since you're likely to read it casually and with confidence, no matter your age or native language, a children's book is apparently even better.

The British Library says it chose one of the beloved Mr. Men series as the book contained all the lexical sets. (Personally, I preferred Mr. Chatterbox and always found the ending of Mr. Tickle to be quite annoying.) For its part, Mr. Tickle contains words like "mischievous," "postman," and "extraordinary." Do you say "miss-cheevy-us" or "miss-chiv-us"?

To add your voice, you can either use the British Library website or an Audioboo mobile app. Copies of Mr. Tickle are available on the library website, as well instructions on how to tag your upload so it appears as part of the collection.

The site is currently quite slow, thanks to some heavy demand right after launch, but we got a chance to test the site while it was still running smoothly. One nice aspect of the project's web site is that it was built with open standard and modern web development techniques in mind.

As these projects typically take years to come to fruition and have to conform to pretty stringent accessibility and long-term storage standards, their web sites often also look like they were developed five years ago. Here, however, the Codex Sinaiticus team did a good job at making the text accessible to the general public (with translations into German, Russian, and Greek), as well as students and scholars who need access to more detailed information and images taken under different lighting conditions.

As is also typical for these projects, however, there is no way for the public or other scholars to directly participate by fixing potential errors in the transcription or translation, for example.

Get More Info

The project website also has more information about how the book was digitized, and the philosophy behind the development of the site.