Springer now offers online access to 37,000 historic, English-language eBooks with the launch of the Springer Book Archives (SBA) at the 2013 American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting (ALA MW). 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).
“The Springer Book Archives marks the culmination of years of planning, scanning and converting our historic titles to a digital format,” said Derk Haank, Springer’s CEO. “Our vision was to make those titles previously unavailable to researchers accessible, and breathe new life into the discoveries that have powered scientific progress. We have literally eliminated ‘out of print’ for Springer titles.”
Rudolf Diesel, Paul Ehrlich and Emil Fischer are among the notable names who 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, proving that at Springer great minds don’t go out of print, they go online.
“Springer’s commitment to the needs of our customers is absolutely central to our strategy,” said Syed Hasan, President of Global STM Academic and Government Sales for Springer. “After hearing time and again that libraries and researchers who depend on the availability of Springer content wanted this accessibility, there was no question that we needed to forge ahead with this historic project.”
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. And 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 opens on January 25 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. Opportunities for interviews with Springer’s senior managers and SBA project staff are also available.
