alt Hacker NewsSmall world - I'm currently cleaning up scans of the EB 9th edition to put it online as a mediawiki site; I'm including all the illustrations and plates so I'm only a third of the way through.
I've been testing different OCR tools and so far I've been the most impressed with paddleOCR - it correctly split the text columns, labled the illustrations, and noted the maragin text.
Still, it's not perfect, so I'm having to hand-edit some tables. I plan to put the source pages online as well so you can switch between the scanned page and the electronic text.
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I'm looking forward to it. The 9th is great in its own right and a lot of it is in the 11th. Alfred Newton's nearly 200 articles on bird species and a few classic essays by Macaulay come to mind offhand.
For those unfamiliar, the 1875 9th ed. was known as the scholar's edition due to how many eminent persons had contributed; it's a fascinating snapshot of the late 1800s.
Other material that would be fun to put online in a hyperlinked and indexed format include geographic and medical atlases and the Baedeker travel guides.