STM publisher Springer announced the launch of the Springer Book Archives (SBA) at the 2013 American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting (ALA MW), offering online access to 37,000 historic, English-language eBooks. The SBA will be completed by the end of this year, and when finished researchers, students and librarians will be able to access more than 170 years of science through 100,000 titles, available anywhere, at anytime, via Springer's online platform, SpringerLink (link.springer.com).
Rudolf Diesel, Paul Ehrlich and Emil Fischer are among the notable names that will appear in the SBA when it is complete. Overall, the work of more than 200 winners of the Nobel Prize will appear in the SBA.
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 optimised for any device. By offering a print-on-demand option for most of the books in the SBA, Springer is also bringing titles unavailable in print for decades, if not longer, back to bookshelves.
The ALA MW is being held at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. Springer staff will be on hand offering visitors a chance to try the SBA at the Springer booth, number 2045, in the main exhibition hall.
