In 2009, Norway's national library (www.nb.no) started a large-scale pilot project in book digitization, covering all Norwegian books from the 90s of each century, i.e. 1690-1699, 1790-1799, 1890-1899 and 1990-1999. Those in the latter range are of course still covered by copyright, and a contract was signed with Kopinor, an association that represents authors' and publishers' interests. The books under copyright can only be read from within Norway. Today, some 50,000 books are available on http://bokhylla.no/
The 2009 contract with Kopinor is available in English at http://www.nb.no/pressebilder/Contract_NationalLibraryandKopinor.pdf
Many of these books are out of copyright, some are in other languages than Norwegian, and User:V85 has been very active in copying them to Wikimedia Commons and the corresponding language of Wikisource. Swedish Wikisource alone has 68 Index: pages originating from nb.no, http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategori:Nasjonalbiblioteket We often find the scanned images excellent, but the OCR not so good, so sometimes we add our own, improved OCR.
One good example is Nansen's "Eskimo Life", that NB.no has scanned in Norwegian (1891), Swedish (1891), and English (1893), and all three are on Wikisource, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eskimo_Life
A Google search reveals that NB.no is indeed indexed, but with a less perfect OCR text, and Wikisource comes out on top, http://www.google.com/search?q=%22nansen+very+carefully+revised+the+text%22
---Now for the news---
The other day, NB.no announced that they have signed a new agreement with Kopinor to continue this project and cover the whole of Norwegian literature until the year 2000. Some 250,000 titles will be available before 2017.
The text of the new contract is not (yet) available. I haven't seen this announced in English yet.
This is NB's own announcement in Norwegian, http://www.nb.no/aktuelt/norsk-litteratur-fra-hele-det-20.-aarhundre-paa-net...
The newspaper Aftenposten also wrote about it, http://www.aftenposten.no/6976583.html
Lars Aronsson, 30/08/2012 01:51:
A Google search reveals that NB.no is indeed indexed, but with a less perfect OCR text, and Wikisource comes out on top, http://www.google.com/search?q=%22nansen+very+carefully+revised+the+text%22
Interesting to see that the archive.org OCR for that passage has a quality level in the middle of Wikisource's and nb.no's and is below both in pagerank. Is archive.org already fetching their books, or is someone uploading them there? This reminds me that I posted http://archive.org/post/426995/finereader-11 .
---Now for the news---
The other day, NB.no announced that they have signed a new agreement with Kopinor to continue this project and cover the whole of Norwegian literature until the year 2000. Some 250,000 titles will be available before 2017.
Thank you for this. So, are all those titles covered by the new contract (copyrighted)? Who's materially doing the scans and who's paying for them? Are they going to Europeana and do they follow Europeana's PD best practices? Thanks, Nemo