I do not think of them as an art form, and wouldn't take a digitised library of docs to a desert island, but I find it increasingly difficult to do without the pain-and-pleasure hit of truthfulness that they provide.
A digitised library that holds seven million interactive objects including over 10,000 ultra-high resolution works of art, Google Art Project features works from 600 venues across 60 different countries.
Using digitised works in the Project Gutenberg library, they processed 7,733 works from 537 authors written after the year 1550, were looking for the frequency at which 307 "content-free" words – such as "of", "at" and "by" – appeared.
Technology continues to bring rapid change to libraries in general and this library in particular: thousands of digitised resources are conveniently and instantly accessible to users regardless of their physical location, traditional library approaches are questioned, services evolve, and budget priorities shift.
The manuscript has been conserved and digitised and will also be on display at the library's Shakespeare in 10 Acts exhibition, which opens on 15 April.
By making digitised books freely available, they ensure that no other library is disadvantaged and that there are as few obstacles to access as possible.
Libraries have trusted Google with millions of documents: many of the books scanned by Google are not digitised or OCR-processed anywhere else and, with budgets for university libraries shrinking year after year, may not be digitised again any time in the near future.
The digitised archives of the Board of Longitude and Nevil Maskelyne can be found at Cambridge Digital Library.
It contains over 6m free, digitised books, including many of the public domain works scanned by Google and other library projects.
In the first half of 2010, if all goes to plan, the world's dominant search engine, Google, will begin to sell online access to somewhere between 5m and 6m books, which it has taken off library shelves, dug out of secondhand bookshops, borrowed from university deposits and digitised – in large part against the wishes of authors and publishers across the world.
The ABC said in a statement the library had been converted to a digital one that offers access to e-books and digital publications and supplies digitised music on demand.
