/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53518000/jpg/_53518081_000414342-1.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="The British Library"span style="width:304px;"The British Library receives more than one million visitors a year/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"One of the world's biggest collections of historic books, pamphlets and periodicals is to be made available on the internet for the first time. /p pThe British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about texts dating back to the 18th Century. /p pIt will allow readers to view, search and copy the out-of-copyright works at no charge. Google will also make the books available on its site./p pThe library gets more than a million visitors a year./p pIt has more than 150 million items representing every age of written civilisation, including books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. /p pGoogle has similar partnerships with about 40 libraries around the world. /p pIts plans to digitise copyrighted texts has run into serious legal problems. Among critics were the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers./ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jGtPQ8XNJtxGYFMNf_fKtLSo6XQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jGtPQ8XNJtxGYFMNf_fKtLSo6XQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jGtPQ8XNJtxGYFMNf_fKtLSo6XQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jGtPQ8XNJtxGYFMNf_fKtLSo6XQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/kxWIoUVY1eA" height="1" width="1"/