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German science, technology and medical publisher Springer Science+Business Media, will digitize its entire catalog of books back to 1840 by the end of the coming year, including works by Einstein, Niels Bohr and Sir John Eccles and Rudolf Diesel. (Yes, that Rudolf Diesel.)

The books, 70% of which are in English and nearly 30% in German, will total 65,000 titles when the project is finished.

Google has awarded $1.25 million apiece to the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Memory Programme and the Desmond Tutu Peace Center. The money is earmarked for the preservation, digitization and sharing of thousands and thousands of documents tracing the transition of the Republic of South Africa from apartheid to democracy.

Mandela's organization will be preserving and digitizing the archive of a man who served as the democracy movement's most public face, a long-term prisoner on the notorious Robben Island and later the first black president of the country.

The European Union says its member states must do more to digitize Europe's cultural heritage and not simply leave that work to the private sector. To do otherwise, suggests a recently commissioned report, could steer Europe away from a digital Renaissance and "into a digital dark age."

The report by the "Comité des Sages" was delivered to the European Commission earlier this week and calls for continued development of Europeana, the portal to Europe's digital libraries, as well as for efforts to expand access to public domain material. EU member states must ensure that all material that's digitized with public funding is available online and that all public domain masterpieces are available via Europeana by 2016. Works that are still covered by copyright but are no longer distributed commercially need to be brought online as well, and if the rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have the opportunity to digitize the material and make it available to the public.

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.