National Library of Israel is Going Digital
The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, home to the world’s largest collection of textual Judaica, is going digital.
The NLI and Google have announced that 120,000 books will soon go online for the first time as part of an historic collaboration.
About 45 percent of the books, including all the NLI’s out-of-copyright books yet to be digitized, are in Hebrew and Hebrew-letter languages such as Yiddish and Ladino, with other works in languages including Latin, English, German, French, Arabic and Russian.
The complex process, expected to take about two years, involves transporting the books in climate-controlled shipping containers to the Google digitization center in Germany. Thousands of works are being sent, scanned and returned each month.
“We are very happy to be working with Google in fulfilling our mission to open access to the treasures of Jewish, Israeli and universal culture for diverse audiences across the globe,” said Yaron Deutscher, NLI’s head of digital access. “It is a significant contribution to our work opening digital access to all books published in the first 450 years of Hebrew printing.”
The Google Books project already encompasses over 40 million books from over 70 libraries in the United States, Europe and Japan, as well as from thousands of publishers. Hebrew is one of over 400 languages in the digital archives.
Read More at israel21c.org
