NEWS

ProQuest Partners with Royal Library in digitisation programme

Cambridge - The Royal Library, Copenhagen and ProQuest have entered into partnership to digitise early printed books from the Danish national collection to add to Early English Books Online which will add a significant corpus of European early printed books to its collection.  This partnership will make this content freely accessible to members of academic institutions, public libraries, schools and other institutions in Denmark.    

Dan Burnstone, Vice President of Arts and Humanities Publishing, ProQuest said, ‘We are very pleased to forge this partnership with the Royal Library Copenhagen to extend Early English Books Online to the rich early modern content available in this rich Danish collection.  This project is an example of a publishing model that offers all the benefits of commercial investment in the digitisation of the collection while at the same time ensuring that the important aspects of Europe’s cultural heritage are preserved and made available to vast new audiences.’  

The Royal Library’s Director General Mr. Erland Kolding Nielsen said, ‘I am very pleased with the partnership between The Royal Library and ProQuest about digitizing the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It is very important that not only the heritage of the big countries of Europe is digitised, but also that of the smaller countries. The collection of The Royal Library has a lot to offer to scholars and book historians in many fields not only in Denmark, but all over the world, as the concept of “national” in many ways belongs to a later historical period.’  

ProQuest’s EEBO presents classic early English works as they appeared in their original format. From the first printed edition of the Canterbury Tales to the works of Shakespeare and Spenser, this collection contains over 100,000 titles beginning with the earliest printed works in the English language.  

The online resource resulting from the digitisation of the Royal Libraries collection will comprise high-resolution colour facsimile images of all of the Royal Library’s Danish imprints produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the earliest works printed in Denmark - Breviarium Othoniense and Guilelmus Caorsin’s Obsidionis Rhodiae urbis descriptio, printed by Johann Snel in Odense in 1482 – through to works by the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) at his press at Uranienborg, on the Island of Hven, before 1597.  The pilot project will also include seventeenth-century editions of works by Brahe and his follower Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630).  The collection comprises more than 2,000 titles; in addition to Danish and Latin, several other European languages are represented.  

http://www.kb.dk.en
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