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Thursday, June 7, 2007
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Google Strikes Deal With 12 Universities to Digitize 10 Million Books
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Google will greatly expand its Google Library Project through a deal it has made to digitize 10 million books in the libraries of 12 universities.
The 12 universities are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the 11 universities in the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago. The deal expands the number of agreements Google has made with universities from 15 to 25. Two Big Ten members, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had already made independent deals with Google, which this arrangement does not supersede.
Google, which says it aims to make all the world's books fully searchable, has already digitally scanned over a million books, and plans to spend years and millions of dollars digitizing more. The electronic copies include both public-domain and copyrighted works -- much to the chagrin of publishers. Although Google's search results offer only snippets from copyrighted works, publishers have filed a lawsuit against Google for making digital copies of their books without their permission.
Lawrence B. Dumas, chairman of the 12-university committee, said the deal with Google would help make the institutions' resources more accessible to researchers.
"Working with Google, we accomplish a long goal we've had of sharing our library resources across all the universities," said Mr. Dumas, who is also provost of Northwestern. "We open access to the world at large to the collections we have."
Wendy P. Lougee, university librarian at the University of Minnesota, said the deal would help both scholars and the general public find material that has been collected over the past 150 years. This includes material from Africa and East Asia as well as from the Midwestern United States, where libraries house a wealth of information about agriculture and mining, she said.
"We see this as a mechanism to preserve the intellectual content for those books that are deteriorating," Ms. Lougee said. "This represents the treasures of the heartland, if you will."
Adam M. Smith, product management director for Google Book Search, said the goal of Google Book Search "is to create a repository of books that allows users to search the full text of those books as easily as they search Web pages today."
"This fits very well with Google's mission, which is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," he said.
After a book is digitized, anyone can use the Internet to search the entire text. Material in the public domain can be viewed in its entirety online and downloaded. If a work is copyrighted, only brief passages will be available online, and additional information will inform Google Library users where they can buy or borrow the book from a bookstore or library.
Sanford G. Thatcher, president elect of the Association of American University Presses, has been a vocal critic of Google's digitization of copyrighted works. But he is also director of Penn State University Press -- and Pennsylvania State University is a member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. He said he applauds Google's effort to preserve public-domain books and to make them widely accessible.
He also said he has been especially concerned about earlier Google Library deals because of copyright issues. But this deal is better, he said, giving it "two and a half cheers." He added: "I simply reserve the one-half cheer for the fact that they are including some copyrighted material in here."
Background articles from The Chronicle:
- Google Wages Fresh Campaign Against Critics of Project to Digitize Library Books (2/23/2006)
- U. of Michigan President Defends Library's Role in Controversial Google Scanning Project (2/7/2006)
- 5 Big Publishing Houses Sue Google to Prevent Scanning of Copyrighted Works (10/20/2005)