Google Inc. will digitize up to 10 million books in university libraries at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, University of Illinois campuses in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign and nine other Midwestern schools as part of its Book Search project.
The addition of the Midwestern libraries significantly expands a two-year effort to digitize library books so their contents may be searched online.
Adam Smith, a Google executive, said his company will pay the bulk of costs to digitize the printed works, while libraries will cover some of the lesser expenses of preparing books for scanning.
Material in the public domain will be available online through Google’s book search; copyrighted material will be digitized but not freely available. Searches will show the names of books and where they can be purchased, and authors of copyrighted material as well as a limited amount of content.
“It’s the equivalent of picking up a book in a store and paging through it,” Smith said.
Google is working on an arrangement under which searchers can download copyrighted material online after paying a fee to the publisher, Smith said.
Google’s six-year agreement is with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a 12-university consortium formed 50 years ago to facilitate academic collaborations among large Midwestern research universities. Besides the Illinois universities, the group includes other Big Ten schools: Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin-Madison.
“This library digitization agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education,” said Lawrence Dumas, Northwestern provost and CIC chairman.
Altogether the CIC libraries have more than 75 million volumes. Google will digitize up to 10 million from select and significant collections. These include Northwestern’s Africana collection, the University of Chicago’s South Asia holdings and a Chicago cultural collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Digitizing the works not only makes them more accessible but also insures their preservation, said Mark Sandler, director of the CIC’s Center for Library Initiatives.
“We have a remarkable opportunity not only to preserve what easily could be lost but to make the entirety of our print collections more accessible than ever through a simple computer search,” said Sandler.
Scholars will be among the project’s chief beneficiaries, said Paula Kaufman, librarian for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“In the print world,” she said, “students and scholars are constrained by searching brief descriptions in card catalogs, tables of contents and indexes. Now, we can search every word in every volume and make connections across works that would’ve taken weeks or years to make in the past.”
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jvan@tribune.com
