Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë!

Friday, July 30, 2010 at 12:00 AM

Posted by Archi Sarkar, Google Books Online Team

Portrait of Emily Jane Brontë (Source: LIFE Magazine)

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
-- Emily Brontë

The indomitable spirit that defined the Yorkshire poet and novelist Emily Brontë also formed the very essence of the classic Wuthering Heights -- her only novel.

In an age when contemporary English society refused to take women’s contributions to literature seriously, Emily and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, adopted ambiguous pen names to have their works published and accepted. In 1846, the Brontë sisters collaboratively published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

The Brontë sisters--Anne, Emily and Charlotte--painted by their brother Bramwell (Source: LIFE Magazine)

While Charlotte Brontë assumed the pseudonym Currer Bell and went on to write Jane Eyre, Anne Brontë settled for Acton Bell and produced Agnes Grey. Emily preferred to be called Ellis Bell in the first edition of Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1847.

And ever since, her creations of Heathcliff and Catherine have captivated audiences worldwide, making Emily Brontë not just a household name, but also a stalwart of romantic fiction. In combination, the courage and passion of her characters, the unusually innovative Gothic structure of her novel and the brilliance of her prose, enabled her to create one of the finest Romantic works.

Actors Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier during filming of Wuthering Heights in 1939 (Source: LIFE Magazine)

Although Emily unfortunately succumbed to tuberculosis at the young age of 30, her spirit continues to live on through her works -- a tribute to her genius.

Here’s remembering you, Emily Brontë! Happy Birthday!

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Google Books goes Dutch

Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 9:15 AM

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnership Development Manager

In recent months, I’ve got to know a group of people in the Hague who are working on an ambitious project to make the rich fabric of Dutch cultural and political history as widely accessible as possible - via the Internet.

That team is from the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), and as of today, we'll be working in partnership to add to the library's own extensive digitisation efforts. We'll be scanning more than 160,000 of its public domain books, and making this collection available globally via Google Books. The library will receive copies of the scans so that they can also be viewed via the library's website. And significantly for Europe, the library also plans to make the digitised works available via Europeana, Europe's cultural portal.

The books we'll be scanning constitute nearly the library's entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection covers a tumultuous period of Dutch history, which saw the establishment of the country's constitution and its parliamentary democracy. Anyone interested in Dutch history will be able to access and view a fascinating range of works by prominent Dutch thinkers, statesmen, poets and academics and gain new insights into the development of the Netherlands as a nation state.

This is the third agreement we've announced in Europe this year, following our projects with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the Austrian National Library. The Dutch national library is already well underway with its own ambitious scanning programme, which will eventually see all of its Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470 onwards being made available online. By any measure, this is a huge task, requiring significant resources, and we're pleased to be able to help the library accelerate towards its goal of making all Dutch books accessible anywhere in the world, at the click of a mouse.

It's exciting to note just how many libraries and cultural ministries are now looking to preserve and improve access to their collections by bringing them online. Much of humanity's cultural, historical, scientific and religious knowledge, collected and curated over centuries, sits in Europe's libraries, and its great to see that we are all striving towards the same goal of improving access to knowledge for all.

Google and other technology companies have an important role to play in achieving this goal, and we hope that by partnering with major European cultural institutions such as the Dutch national library, we will be able to accelerate the rapid growth of Europe's digital library.

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog) Read the full post 0 comments