Cambridge University Library Digitise Their Treasures

Cambridge University Library has been a legal deposit library since 1710 and since that date has acquired a copy of each book and journal published in the UK and Ireland. As you can expect this means that the libraries shelves are expanding at a rate of two miles per year and currently house some 8 million books and periodicals and 1 million maps. Cambridge University Library now is embarking on creating a "digital library for the world" by digitising its collection.

The programme follows a pledge of £1.5m from Dr Polonsky, founder of the Polonsky-Coexist Lectureship in Jewish Studies at the University.

The library contains some of the greatest books published, including the papers of Isaac Newton and a number of the oldest and most significant Qur'ans ever to be uncovered, as well an eighth Century copy of Surat al-Anfal, the eighth chapter of the Qur'an.It also holds the Jewish Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection of some 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls and one of the most important Greek New Testament manuscripts.

If successful, further funding will be sought to add the collections of Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, and Stephen Hawking, along with other major collections in the fields of humanities and social sciences.

So with national libraries all starting to have similar programmes, The British library digitising newsprint and Google hovering up anything that it can, who will have the authoritative new digital equivalent of the library of Alexandria.

Darwin Online for All

The complete works of Charles Darwin, the man who in 1859, changed the course of science by writing the evolutionary, The Origin of Species, have been finally made available for anyone, anywhere to read. Cambridge University, where Darwin studied theology, was given the collection by the Darwin family and Pilgrim Trust after World War II. It was described in 1960 as a bundle of parcels each containing small packets of manuscripts wrapped in tissue paper.

Cambridge has digitized and published online for all for free its collection of some 30,000 items and 90,000 images, which until now, was only available only to scholars at the Cambridge University Library. The Darwin Online project began in 2002 and claims to be the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue created. The collection also includes drafts of the scientist’s writings and a travel diary from his sea voyage on the Beagle, where he first his theories on evolution.

The collection may cause debate as it also touches on his religious views. A memo written by his wife, Emma, in 1839, expresses her concerns about Darwin's declining faith. "May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way?"