Wikipedia:GLAM/British Library/Books

Some years ago, the British Library partnered with an external funder to digitise a large collection (~45,000 titles, ~65,000 volumes) of 19th century books. These are currently available through JISC Historic Books and other sources such as via print-on-demand copies at Amazon and an iPad application.

The Library have recently announced that:

It is not yet publicly available online, due to size issues - the whole collection comes to around 4TB, including page images and marked-up XML. However, I have been able to start uploading selected volumes to Commons and Wikisource (the OCR is very good quality) and I am happy to take requests for anything that might be useful.

The collection is predominantly UK-published material in English, as would be expected; however, there are significant amounts in French and German, and a few hundred in various other European languages. Both fiction and nonfiction are covered; anecdotally, there seem to be particular strengths in travel books, but this may just be a quirk of the period.

There are two caveats. Firstly, there's no accessible public catalogue restricted to just this collection (though we do have a single massive spreadsheet). It's all in the central catalogue, and this search should cover most of what's in it.

If you find any item which a) has "[electronic resource]" in the title, b) dates between 1780 and 1920, and c) looks like a record for a book, there is a good chance it's part of this collection and available for release.

Secondly, it's not well-indexed. Older catalogue records tended not to have good subject-headings by modern standards, and so often all that we have to go on as to what the book is about is the title - there is no full-text searching available at the moment. If you can't find anything relevant, try searching on variant terms - or feel free to make very broad requests and see what I can find!

So far uploaded:

• Burke, W.S. - Cycling in Bengal (1898) (DjVu, Wikisource (in progress).)
• Cole, Henry - A hand-book to Hampton Court (1884) (PDF, DjVu)
• Garner, Robert - Natural History of the County of Stafford (1844) (PDF)
• Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897) (PDF, DjVu)
• Kennedy, Robert John - A Journey in Khorassan (1890) (PDF, DjVu, Wikisource (completed).)
• Malabari, Behramji M. - Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1882) (DjVu, Wikisource (completed).)
• McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856) (PDF, DjVu, Wikisource (in progress).)

• Suggestions for what you would like me to dig out and upload are welcome! There are substantial amounts of, for example, local histories which may be useful.

Sister Nivedita

• Sister Nivedita Atmaprana will be highly helpful to expand Sister Nivedita article! Remove this request if it does not meet condition mentioned here! --Tito Dutta (talk) 02:51, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Also this --Tito Dutta (talk) 02:55, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • No luck, I'm afraid - both too recent. Andrew Gray (talk)

• This book about the Père Lachaise Cemetery ? ~Pyb (talk) 11:10, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes! Downloaded; will get the PDF up shortly but the DjVu might have to wait a little while. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:22, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PDF Andrew Gray (talk) 11:17, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]