The Jouve Group will work in partnership with Safig, Diadéis and the subcontractor BancTec, to digitize more than 70,000 works per year [it’s a three year deal] of which around 70% will come from the print collections of the BnF and 30% from the collections of partner libraries. Financed by the Centre national du livre, the agreement has been agreed for a three year period, renewable for one year after.
The previous agreement was signed in 2007 with a Safig-BancTec-Diadéis partnership. It allowed the digitization and OCR (optical character recognition) of 36.6 million pages.
The new deal will offer very high standards of quality: 400 DPI resolution, digitization in colour or greyscale, a minimal guaranteed OCR standard of 98.5% for documents produced after 1750, and 20% of documents digitized with high quality OCR (99.9%). In addition, at least 10% of documents will be provided in an ePub version, compatible with mobile e-readers.
The documents will enrich Gallica, the BnF’s digital library (gallica.bnf.fr).
Here’s a mechanical translations of a ZDNet story about the BnF digitization deal.
Via Google Translate
We Learn:
Google was originally approached to do the digitization
The deal with Jouve is for three years/210,000 Books
The digitized books will use the ePub format
Via INFOdocket
And the French will undoubtedly end up paying through the nose for it. France, the country of fixed price monopolies and cartels.