Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, UK, has announced that the company will digitise more than 30,000 rare early books from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, capturing every volume in high-resolution colour scans. This is the third major European national library to participate in ProQuest's Early European Books project after the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. As with the agreements in Denmark and Italy, the material will be free to access in the host country.
ProQuest will scan the library's holdings up to 1700, beginning with books printed in the Netherlands before moving onto works from other countries. The KB's collection range from the nation's earliest printed books through to the output of the printing house of Elzevir, founded in Leiden in 1583. The Elzevir family was reportedly at the forefront of European intellectual life in the 17th century, publishing current thinkers such as René Descartes (1596-1650) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) alongside important editions of Classical authors (Virgil, Terence, Pliny, Caesar), and a series of books by French authors on history and politics known as the Petites Républiques.
Through the Early European Books project, ProQuest is seeking to build a comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700 by digitising and bringing together the holdings of major rare book libraries. Scanning on-site at each library, the books are sought to be captured in vivid detail.
Early European Books collections are available for purchase for libraries worldwide, and are delivered via a multilingual interface. The interface is said to allow powerful searching of the detailed indexing, as well as cross-searching of the well-known Early English Books Online database, with its facsimiles of 125,000 books printed in English or in the British Isles between 1473 and 1700.
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