Page turning treasures 'Find of the Year'

18 January 2005 :: Posted by Susan Poupard

British Library site wins Yahoo! Finds of the Year 2004 award

The British Library's Turning The Pages website has won the ‘Innovative' category in Yahoo! UK and Ireland‘s Top 10 Finds of the Year competition. Visitors to Yahoo! now have the chance to vote for one of the 10 category-winners as ‘the people's choice award'.

The Library‘s Turning The Pages technology allows internet users world-wide to browse the handwritten pages of masterpieces – including the Lindisfarne Gospels, Leonardo‘s Notebook, the Sforza Hours and Sultan Baybars‘ Qur‘an – and magnify selected areas. Three-dimensional animation mimics the action of turning each page, which can be done using a mouse or by scrolling through. Users can magnify the images and read or listen to notes explaining the beauty and significance of each page.

In May last year, Turning The Pages featured as ‘pick of the day’ on Yahoo! UK & Ireland. Every year Yahoo! compiles a shortlist of ten categories from the year‘s ‘pick of the day’ websites and invites a panel of judges to vote for their ten favourite websites of the year. Turning the Pages came out top in the 'Innovative' category and visitors to the site will now have the chance to vote for their favourite out of all ten categories.

For further information, contact Ben Sanderson at the British Library Press Office. Telephone: + 44 (0)1937 546126. Email: ben.sanderson@bl.uk.

Notes for editors

The twelve treasures available as Turning the Pages are: Leonardo da Vinci‘s Notebook - The Sherborne Missal - Elizabeth Blackwell‘s 17th century Herbal - Vesalius's 16th century De Humani Corporis Fabrica – The Diamond Sutra – The Sforza Hours – The Golden Haggadah – The Luttrell Psalter – The Lindisfarne Gospels – Sultan Babyars‘ Qur‘an – The Golf Book, a 15th century book of hours – Jane Austen‘s History of England.

Turning the Pages® developed by British Library staff beginning in 1998, and later in collaboration with Armadillo Systems, has won several other awards. The Library plans to produce several more Turning the Pages® projects in 2005. These include the manuscript version of Alice‘s Adventures Under Ground, written with pen and ink pictures by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) and William Blake‘s Notebook which contains many of the drafts for Blake‘s Songs of Innocence and Experience as well as numerous sketches.

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world‘s largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library‘s collections offer an unequalled treasure trove for the creative researcher: they include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to today‘s newspapers. Further information is available on the Library‘s website.

Further praise about Turning the Pages "The sensation of actually leafing through a rare volume is uncannily real," Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D, Director, National Library of Medicine.

"Terrific ... makes the whole notion of exhibiting books credible, for perhaps the first time in history", Will Self.