Digital libraries: Google to digitize a million Italian books

Google and the Italian Culture Ministry have signed an agreement for the digitization of a million old books held in Italy's national libraries of Rome and Florence. In 1966 thousands of books kept at the city library in Florence were damaged during a flood, informed an official at the Ministry of Culture of Italy Mario Resca to Associated Press. According to him, digitization will help to preserve the books’ content for centuries. Digitization of books, which had been published prior to 1868, including 19 c. fiction and scientific works dating back to 18th c., will also contribute to popularization of Italian culture worldwide, stressed Mr Resca.

"The agreement has got a considerable political power, because Italy thus comes to the forefront of books’ digitization. We are now trying to enrich the cultural resources on the Internet", - said the Minister of Culture of Italy Sandro Bondi.

Google and the Italian Culture Ministry said that the current project was the first such agreement undertaken by Google and Italy. Google is going to fund the project and set up a digitization center in Italy.

The National Library Service of Italy (SBN) has an experience of the books’ digitization projects. Around 285,000 digitized books are already available on the Internet.