STM publisher Springer has announced that it will offer online access to 100,000 eBooks with historic content through its Springer Book Archives (SBA), available anywhere, at any time, via SpringerLink by the end of 2013. As early adopters, Australasian universities were some of the first to offer access to this wealth of scientific content to students, faculty and researchers. Official launch events for the SBA will be held at the University of Melbourne on April 5, 2013, and at The Higher Education Technology Agenda Conference in Hobart, Australia, on April 8.
An undertaking of this magnitude involved thousands of hours to carefully scan each historic title, clean up any markings or imperfections, convert illustrations into high-resolution digital images, make the content discoverable and offer it to users in convenient formats. The end result of these efforts is an unprecedented collection of historic, scholarly eBooks, available DRM-free with full text searchability, and optimized for any device. Springer is also bringing titles unavailable in print for decades, if not longer, back to bookshelves by offering a print-on-demand option.
Rudolf Diesel, Paul Ehrlich and Emil Fischer are among the notable names that will appear in the SBA. Works of many Nobel Laureates are among the titles offered, including those of a number of Australian luminaries.
The University of Melbourne became the first institution in the southern hemisphere to purchase the SBA in November 2012, ahead of its official launch in January 2013. The University of Auckland, La Trobe University and The University of South Australia all subsequently purchased the SBA ahead of its official launch, and numerous other institutions are in discussions to acquire it.
