The controversy over the British Library’s Amazon links is not over. The Bookseller reports that Tim Godfray, chief executive of the UK’s Booksellers Association, is asking the British Library’s CEO to review the matter, and other booksellers are expressing dismay at the library “ignoring the whole UK book trade in favor of Amazon.” Johnny de Falbe of John Sandoe bookshop said: “The British Library says it is ‘providing users with the choice of an alternative method of obtaining a title if, for some reason, it is not available in the Library’s Reading Rooms’. But users...

The Bookseller has an article on the British Library reinstituting a controversial linking scheme in its on-line catalog that added a link to Amazon’s catalog from each book entry. It had removed the scheme last week in response to complaints by booksellers, but after consideration was reinstated “because of its usefulness for library users seeking further information about collection items.” I do have to admit, Amazon is a pretty comprehensive source of detailed information (including ISBNs), reviews, and so forth for most books. The library said the Amazon pilot was set up "with the aim of...

This was announced back in June but the collection has grown significantly since that date. It now includes 45K titles, up from 19K. Here is more from the press release: BiblioLabs, LLC and the British Library have launched their British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for iPad - now available on the App Store. The App was announced in June with an initial offering of a thousand 19th century books - it now makes some 45,000 titles available to subscribers, expanding to over 60,000 titles by the end of the year. For just £1.99 a month in the UK...

The British Library has embarked on a project to map accents and pronunciation of words by English-speakers worldwide, as part of its Evolving English exhibit. To that end, they have asked any English-speaker world-wide to record themselves reading aloud the children’s book Mr. Tickle for the benefit of their collection. The idea is that reading prose aloud tends to be more natural and conversational than simply reading lists of words, and also Mr. Tickle includes some words that have interesting variant pronunciations, like “mischievous” or “extraordinary”. Readers can take part in the project at the British Library...

From Resource Shelf. Worth reprinting in full: Earlier this week we posted about a “just announced” 10 year project from the British Library to digitize 40+ million newspaper pages. From the Official Announcement: Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Regarding copyright issues it goes on to say: Along with out-of-copyright material from the newspaper archive – defined in this context as pre-1900 newspaper material – the partnership will also seek to digitise a...

The British Library is teaming with online publisher Brightsolid to parter in a 10 year venture to digitize three centuries of 52,000 local, regional, national and international newspapers. Digitized material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Additional categories will be developed looking at key events and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. The aim will be to build a ‘critical mass’ of material for researchers...

The British Library has launched the UK Web Archive offering access to thousands of UK websites. You can find it here. From the press release Currently home to roughly 8 million sites, the UK web domain is a rapidly expanding and constantly changing record of social and cultural issues in 21st century Britain. Despite common misperceptions, material that is freely available on the web is still subject to copyright and cannot be archived without permission - a time consuming, expensive, and often impossible task. Worryingly, recent research estimates the average life expectancy of a website is just...

The Library's ebook project will make more than 65,000 first-editions available this spring for the first time. It is funded by Microsoft. Microsoft and the Library have been scanning books for the past three years. The article in the Telegraph about the project goes on to say: As well as classic titles by famous 19th Century authors, many of the downmarket books known as “penny dreadfuls” will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J M Rymer. In addition, paperback copies of the first editions will be available...

This is from the press release. However, looking at the site it seems as if full access is by subscription only and if you don't want to subscribe you have to access the collection by going to a participating local library. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, along with The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), have made nineteenth-century British newspapers available on the internet. The database, known as “British Newspapers, 1800-1900″ and available at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/, gives users access to over two million newspaper pages from 49 different national and regional newspapers from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland....