The Digital Blog

May, 25th 2008. Microsoft Inc. (Redmond, USA) announced that they are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President Search, Portal and Advertising at Microsoft Inc., states:
“As we wind down Live Search Books, we are reaching out to participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications.”

CCS would like to thank Microsoft as co-initiator and patron of this extraordinary digitization project at the British Library for the successful and extremely productive collaboration throughout the last year. We will honor all existing contracts and continue to deliver high quality digitization products with unchanged high ambitions to the British Library.

We believe that Microsoft’s Book Search Project not only helped to digitize a large amount of books but also generated valuable knowledge to meet the challenges of mass digitization projects to both the library community and the digitization partners. CCS will support all endeavors to continue these projects that Microsoft has started. CCS expects to contribute to more upcoming mass digitization projects based on both public and commercial funding.

For further information please see:

Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/
The British Library: http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20080528.html