Bodleian Libraries books digitised for the the Google Books project can now be accessed via SOLO, the library catalogue.

About the project
In 2004, Oxford University entered into partnership with Google to scan the Bodleian Libraries’ out-of-copyright holdings, in particular those from the 19th century. The initial phase of this work completed in the summer of 2009, with several hundred thousand of our books being scanned and made available via Google Books (http://books.google.com/).

Items were selected solely on their copyright status and suitability for scanning, and the works that have been digitized cover a wide range of languages, disciplines, and genres. They include Alfred Franklin’s Les Chirurgiens and Ernest Godard’s Egypte et Palestine: Observations medicales et scientifiques

Accessing digitised copies via SOLO in 2 steps
1.   A search on SOLO will normally produce a list of “brief-display” results.  If there is a digitized copy associated with a record, as in this example, a line will be added saying:
*** Digitized copy available – see Details tab for link ***

2.  Clicking on the title of a bibliographic record found in SOLO or on its Details tab will display the whole record.  If the digitized version is available, it will be indicated by a link on the right-hand side saying: View digitized copy (PDF) of… followed by the name of the holding library and the shelfmark of the physical copy that was scanned. Clicking on this link will download the file.

More to come
Further work is planned to enable the text in digitized copies to be search and to make it possible to cut and paste text from the files.   Additional copies are due to be added to SOLO in the future, once they have been processed by Google.

Related links: SOLO | Oxford’s digitised books | Google Books