ReadWriteWeb

One of my favorite places on earth, the British Library, and the world's most popular search engine, Google, have struck a spectacular deal. The BL will allow the search and media company to scan and index 250,000 texts dating from between 1700 and 1870.

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

Google announced last week that it was shutting down its News Archive Project. Akin to the massive Google Books project, this was a plan to digitize the world's newspaper archives and make them searchable online. But if you're worried about the digitization and preservation of British newspapers, fear not. As The Guardian reports today, the British Library is moving forward with its plans to digitize some 40 million newspaper pages from its vast 750 million collection.

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.

The national library of Great Britain and the world's largest library, the British Library, is launching its first smartphone app today for iPhone, iPad and Android. The "Treasures" app offers a selection of the items available in the Library's Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery and includes over 100 collection items, 250 high-definition images, and 40 videos with expert commentary, as well as information about the Library's current exhibitions.

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.

For those that have been busily searching Google's new Ngram Viewer to assess how language has changed over time, here's another project that might pique your interest, one that involves another great literary work, Roger Hargreaves's children's book Mr. Tickle.

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.

The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest version of the Christian Bible in book form, and, according to many scholars, one of the world's greatest written treasures. The actual leaves and fragments from the book are in the British Library in England, as well as in various archives in Germany and Russia, and the St. Catherine's Monastery of Sinai, where the text was originally discovered. Starting today, however, anybody with access to an Internet connection and a modern browser can now see a virtual facsimile of the book online.