To provide access to our collections to as many people as
possible, the Library started thinking about digitisation as far
back as the late 1980s. But the first definable project was in
1993 when we digitised the Beowulf manuscript and saved it onto
CD-ROM. Since then, some of our most iconic items, such as the
Lindisfarne Gospels and Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook have been
digitised. In 2003 we started on a coordinated programme to make
many more of the 150 million items in our collections available
to millions of people via the Internet. Since then, we've
implemented a number of major large-scale digitisation projects.
For example, we've digitised four million pages of pre-1900
papers, 8000 hours of sound recordings and a huge number of 19th
century books. Digitising on such a massive scale brings a lot
of challenges. For example, in digitising books and newspapers,
the digital resources allow for a full text search, using
Optical Character Recognition software. But older books and
newspapers use different f