Austrian Books Online

As one of the first national libraries worldwide the Austrian National Library will digitise and make available online its complete holdings of historical books from the 16th to the 19th century – one of the five internationally most important historical book collections.

The project will be carried out in a Public Private Partnership with Google. We will digitise around 400.000 public domain works which will be available without restrictions and free of charge via the digital library of the Austrian National Library and via Google Books. In addition users will be able to access the digital books via Europeana, the European digital library.

In the near future users will find the digitised books in the Austrian National Library’s online catalogue and will be able to access them via a single click, perform full-text searches, read them online or download the entire works.

The Austrian National Library follows the examples of renowned libraries like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford or the Bavarian State Library which have already been collaborating with Google in Google’s Book Search Programme for several years. Google funds the digitisation of the entire book collection of about 120 Mio pages, the Austrian National Library meets the expenses for the preparation of the books and for storing and making available the digital copies in its digital library.

As in many cases it will no longer be necessary to access the original books, this project will also contribute to the protection of the Austrian National Library’s precious historical book collection. The Austrian National Library will archive the digital copies in its digital archival system for the long term.