Cambridge, United Kingdom, August 20, 2009 - The Royal Library, Copenhagen and ProQuest have entered into a partnership to digitise early printed books from the Danish national collection and make them freely accessible to members of academic institutions, public libraries, schools and other institutions in Denmark. The project will form part of the pilot for ProQuest’s Early European Books digitisation programme.

Dan Burnstone, Vice President of Arts and Humanities Publishing, ProQuest said: “We are delighted to forge this partnership with the Royal Library. It constitutes the first step towards creating the non-English language counterpart to Early English Books Online (EEBO), which has itself been hugely beneficial to recent early modern scholarship. The Danish national collection contains many works that profoundly influenced pan-European intellectual life in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This project employs a pioneering publishing model that benefits from the expertise of a specialist humanities publisher whilst at the same time ensuring wider access for European citizens, and the scholarly world beyond, to Europe’s cultural heritage’.

The Royal Library’s Director General Mr. Erland Kolding Nielsen said, ‘I am very pleased with the partnership between The Royal Library and ProQuest to digitise the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is very important that the heritage of the small countries of Europe is digitised as well as that of the larger ones. The collection of The Royal Library has a lot to offer to scholars and book historians in many fields, not only in Denmark, but all over the world, particularly as the concept of “national” in many ways belongs to a later historical period.’

To be launched at the end of 2009, the online resource resulting from the digitisation of the Royal Library’s collection will comprise high-resolution colour facsimile images of all of the Royal Library’s Danish imprints produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will range from the earliest books printed in Denmark through to works by the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) produced at his press at Uranienborg, on the Island of Hven, before 1597. The pilot project will also include seventeenth-century editions of works by Brahe and his follower Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630). The collection comprises more than 2,000 titles in Danish, Latin, German, and other languages.

The Royal Library Copenhagen: http://www.kb.dk/en/

About Early English Books Online
Early English Books Online™, 1475-1700 (EEBO) provides digital access to more than 100,000 literary and historical classics. Through the Web, researchers can view images that accurately reflect the way the works appeared in their original printed editions.

EEBO contains images of works by authors such as Malory, Spenser, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, and Galileo. The database also includes musical exercises by Henry Purcell, novels by Aphra Behn, and prayer books, pamphlets, proclamations, almanacs, calendars, and many other primary resources.

When complete, EEBO will contain all the works, more than 22 million pages, represented in the microfilm series Early English Books I & II, which include the titles listed in these comprehensive bibliographic records of English literature: The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard & Redgrave, 1475-1640); The Short-Title Catalogue II (Wing, 1641-1700); The Thomson Tracts, a compendium of broadsides on the English Civil War printed between 1640 and 1661; and The Early English Books Tract Supplements. For further information, visit http://eebo.chadwyck.com/marketing/

About ProQuest
ProQuest creates specialized information resources and technologies that propel successful research, discovery, and lifelong learning. A global leader in serving libraries of all types, ProQuest offers the expertise of such respected brands as Chadwyck-Healey™, UMI®, SIRS®, and eLibrary®. With Serials Solutions®, Ulrich's™, RefWorks®, COS™, Dialog® and now Bowker® part of the ProQuest brand family, the company supports the breadth of the information community with innovative discovery solutions that power the business of books and the best in research experience.

More than a content provider or aggregator, ProQuest is an information partner, creating indispensable research solutions that connect people and information. Through innovative, user-centered discovery technology, ProQuest offers billions of pages of global content that includes historical newspapers, dissertations, and uniquely relevant resources for researchers of any age and sophistication—including content not likely to be digitized by others. Inspired by its customers and their end users, ProQuest is working toward a future that blends information accessibility with community to further enhance learning and encourage lifelong enrichment.

For more information, visit www.proquest.com or the ProQuest parent company website, www.cig.com.