The British Library announced yesterday they will be making the license available for their Turning The Pages software toolkit. The 3D software has been redeveloped by Armadillo Systems and has already allowed Britain’s national library to publish fully interactive copies online of famous treasures such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks and Mercator’s Atlas of Europe.

This means that like the BL’s offering other libraries can now show their virtual books at different angles, allow users to zoom and rotate copies and even compare works. The Armadillo Systems tool-kit will allow users to add their high-resolution digital copies of works and post them online as virtual 3d reproductions. To fully utilise the toolkit, Windows Vista is a must. Adding audio commentary, annotations and even determining the kind of paper and how the page turns are options. As far as Web 2.0 widgets go, viewers can also comment on the source material.

The good news for libraries and archives that want a piece of the action but don’t have the budget is that there will be a competition run by the BL and Armadillo to offer toolkits to a set of winners. What’s more, their freshly digitised content will be accessible on the British Libraries site for 3 years giving libraries that are less established the chance to digitise their most precious books not to mention some decent exposure for the institute concerned.

Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services at the British Library has this to say; “Turning The Pages toolkit has allowed us to create high-quality digital replicas of some of the most valuable books in the World and make them available to anyone with access to the Internet. With the launch of Turning The Pages 2.0, other libraries, archives and museums can now use our software to do the same”

The enhancement to the software follows Microsoft’s initial launch of new operating system Vista, in which they fully digitised Bill Gates’ copy of Da Vinci’s codex notebook. It accompanied the BL’s to highlight how the software can be utilised to create highly interactive digital copies of printed works.