The Norwegian National Library began a digitizing program back in 2006 and as of 2012 they have digitized “350,000 newspaper editions, 235,000 books and 240,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts.” They are storing all of these publications within a ‘cloud’ and any user with a Norwegian IP address can freely access them.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland have also began digitizing their collections over the last five years. The difference is that Norway is scanning not only non-copyrighted items, but those still under copyright. According to their press release, only non-copyrighted items will be made free, but all materials will be entered into their digital cloud called a “National Memory Bank”.
Norway does intend to keep it’s physical libraries and paper manuscript collections available.
