Open Access News

The University of California is negotiating with Google to join the search-engine giant's book-digitization project. If the company and the university system agree to a deal -- which, sources within the university say, could happen soon -- Google might have access to as many as 34 million books within the system.

Details about the negotiations and the potential agreement, including who might pay for the digitization project, are scant. The university system's Board of Regents heard a presentation, "Large-Scale Digitization of UC Library Holdings: An Historic Opportunity," at a meeting in late July, but the minutes of that meeting are not yet available. Daniel Greenstein, director of the system's California Digital Library, would not offer specifics of the negotiations, other than to say, "The deal is not done."...

The University of California would join libraries at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library, all of which have agreements with the search-engine company to scan portions of their collections. Michigan's agreement appears to be the most comprehensive: Google is scanning the university's entire library holdings of more than seven million volumes....

The University of California is already involved in a competing mass-digitization project, the Open Content Alliance, which includes 30 universities as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. The Open Content Alliance, or OCA, operates on an open-source model, while Google's digitization project has been notoriously secretive. The alliance has avoided controversy by promising that no books that are under copyright will be scanned unless the copyright holders give explicit permission.

Brewster Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, who helped found the Open Content Alliance, said California's deal with Google "does not seem to affect the university's interest in working with the OCA."  But, he said, the Google deal might "undermine the bigger picture of the OCA, of being an alternative."

"I think we're going to have to see how that turns out," he said. As a result of the negotiations with California, Mr. Kahle wondered if Google would choose to be more open about the library material it is digitizing. "Then we could have one project," he said. "Because there is no point in scanning these books twice."

Mr. Greenstein, of the California Digital Library, said the University of California was committed to the public domain and to new digital roles of libraries. "Take those things together, and we'll work with anybody who shares that mission," he said. "It's not about OCA, Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google. It's about what we want to do. It's absolutely essential that we would continue to push forward in these ways. We see this as the future of the academy and the future of the university."