Cambridge launches project to digitise its rare books

Cambridge University Library has announced plans to become a digital library offering world-wide access over the Internet, following a £1.5m donation from Leonard Polonsky.

The library has more than seven million books and some of the greatest collections in existence, including those of Newton and Darwin. It will now begin digitising these treasures to launch the Digital Library for the 21st Century.

Anne Jarvis, University Librarian, said, “Our library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia. We want to make it accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an Internet connection and a thirst for knowledge. This will not only make our collections available to the world; it will also initiate a global conversation about them.”

“At the click of a mouse, students or scholars of divinity or politics, history, physics, medieval languages or the history of medicine, will be able to plunge into the worlds of Mediterranean Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities of the 11th Century, or into the minds of Isaac Newton and his contemporaries.”

Polonsky’s gift will allow the University Library to set up the infrastructure required for this digitisation project.

The first collections to be digitised will be entitled The Foundations of Faith and The Foundations of Science. The goal for both is that they become living libraries with the capacity to grow and evolve.

The library holds some of the world’s most important records of the development of modern science, including the most comprehensive collection of Newton’s papers, featuring heavily annotated copies of Principia, his lectures as Lucasian Professor and proofs of Opticks, and the papers of John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley, contemporaries of Newton, with whom he corresponded.

If the project proves successful and other donors are found the collections of scientists such as Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, and Stephen Hawking could also be digitised.