Project Runeberg,
We're no longer alone in digitizing old literature. New projects seem to be popping up every month or so. Google Book Search has been running for little more than a year. Yahoo and Microsoft are partnering with the Internet Archive to build the Open Content Alliance. The European Union has said it wants to digitize six million books before the end of 2007. Litteraturbanken.se is a Swedish website that was launched this autumn. And now Sweden's national library is using extra funding to hire unemployed librarians (since elections are due in September) to start a new digitization project.
This week I wish I could visit the CeBIT expo in Hanover, Germany, and at the same time attend a two-day seminar in Michigan, USA. I can do neither of those, but now I learned that the seminar is going to be webcasted for free and for everybody. Perhaps you will find it interesting to learn what people from Google and the publisher O'Reilly think about "mass digitization", with a panel discussing the implications for libraries and public sector. The University of Michigan is one of Google's partner libraries.
Details about the schedule and speakers, http://lib.umich.edu/mdp/symposium/
Instructions for viewing the Webcast, http://lib.umich.edu/mdp/symposium/webcast.html
I suppose the times are in Eastern Standard Time (EST), which is 5 hours west of Greenwich and 6 hours west of central Europe. Here are some highlights from the program:
Friday, March 10, 2006 9:10-10:00 am: Keynote Speaker Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO, O'Reilly Media 5:00-5:30 pm: Adam Smith, Google
That should mean the keynote speech starts at 15:10 Swedish time, but the first welcome speaker is on already at 14:30. Adam Smith should be speaking at 23:00 Swedish time.