Bruno Racine, the head of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the National Library of France, has said that the Library's massive programme to digitise billions of books and documents should widen their availability without violating copyright rules.
Over the past decade, the library has collected 10 billion documents online, and is currently scanning 300,000 books into digital format. The move is part of a plan to set up a European virtual library. The BNF and the French Publishers' Association are reportedly drawing up legal and economic guidelines enabling the release of online editions to the public. Scheduled for launch in March 2008, the plan calls for free access to works described as part of the national heritage and payment for access to works under copyright.
European national libraries joined forces in 2005 against a planned communications revolution by US-based Internet search firm Google to form a global virtual library. As a result, the European Digital Library (EDL) was formed involving 34 national libraries across the continent.
The Library head also announced that the Library's historic home in Paris, which houses nearly 20 million documents, will undergo a five-year $219 million restoration programme starting from 2009.
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