Microsoft to Digitize British Library Books

In Library parlance, there are two primary sources of bibliographic information of published materials. If you can’t find the CIP (cataloging-in-publication) data of a published book from the Library of Congress Union Catalog, chances are you’d find it at the British Library.

Fast forward to 2005, Google despite  receiving several flaks from American Association of Publishers and Author’s Guild continues with its Google Print project and posted the first part of its digitization project covering books which are already included in the public domain or in simple terms, books which are no longer covered by copyright laws.

Recently, in a BBC article, Microsoft announces its plan of digitizing 100,00 books in the British Library collection and will make them available to public.

Will these two corporate giants able to do what the field of librarianship failed to do? That is make information available to user at the right place and at the right time?  That remains to be seen in the coming days.