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-ne…
The newspaper Aftenposten also wrote about it,
http://www.aftenposten.no/6976583.html
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature -
http://runeberg.org/