The University of Cambridge Library has announced “a £1.5m lead gift pledged by Dr Leonard Polonsky” to fund a new, open digital project in the history of science.

University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “We want to make it accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge. This will not only make our collections available to the world; it will also initiate a global conversation about them.”

The announcement explains that one of the first digital collections will feature the works and papers of Isaac Newton, John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley.

Dr Polonsky said: “As reading and research become increasingly electronic, my hope is that this grant will serve as a catalyst for the digitisation and linking of the great libraries of the world so that their riches can be enjoyed by a global public.”

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Update, 12/14/2011:

• Cambridge Digital Library
• Cambridge posts Newton papers
• Cambridge Libraries news release
• Newton Papers, Cambridge Digital Library

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The OU History of Science Collections collaborated with Cambridge Libraries by contributing to the Darwin Online digital library. Indeed, OU is the largest contributor to that project other than Cambridge Library (learn more about our involvement with Darwin Online).

Like Cambridge’s announced “Foundations of Science” project, the OU image galleries are accessible to anyone on the open internet. For the last several years, individuals from around the world have used the OU image galleries to download high quality images from the works of Newton, Flamsteed, Galileo, Darwin and others. For more information, click the Images recently digitized category link in the right margin.

Above: Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687); lower text-block, “Matematico Neuton.” In many early libraries, author and title information were written on the textblock to be legible when books were stacked on their sides.