Springer started 2014 by announcing two major accomplishments. The publisher completed its Springer Book Archives (SBA), a four-year project to digitise nearly every book it had published from the 1840s to 2004. While the company originally anticipated that around 100,000 books would be part of this effort, more than 110,000 titles were included. Also, due in large part to the addition of those books in the SBA, SpringerLink – Springer's online content platform – surpassed eight million documents for the first time.
Every title slated for inclusion in the pioneering Springer Book Archives had been digitised and made available for students, researchers and libraries by early 2014. The SBA project began in 2010 and the product was officially launched in January 2013 at the American Library Association's Midwinter meeting. Rudolf Diesel, Werner von Siemens and Emil Fischer are counted among those authors whose works have become part of this precedent-setting endeavour.
The addition of these important scientific titles to the rest of Springer's offerings helped push the content available on SpringerLink to more than eight million documents. These resources include journal articles, book chapters, reference work entries and protocols. SpringerLink users can also download entire eBooks at one time, in addition to chapter by chapter – another new feature added in 2013. Passing this threshold means that more high-quality Springer content is available to researchers and students than ever before.
