Scott Carlson and Jeffrey Young, Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Leading Research Libraries, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 14, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'Five of the world's largest libraries have joined Google in a Herculean effort to digitize millions of books and make every sentence searchable. The project, which Google officials plan to announce today, involves 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. It could soon turn Google into the single largest holder of digitized published material, while also providing researchers and students with an unprecedented tool for finding information. The trickiest issue is copyright. The company will begin by scanning works that are in the public domain, and the full contents of those books will accessible online through the popular Google search engine. But the company also plans to scan copyrighted books in some of the libraries. The search engine will not return the full texts of those volumes, but will instead provide up to three short excerpts....The number of volumes that could be scanned is astounding: Harvard holds some 15 million volumes; the New York Public Library has 20 million; Stanford has more than 7.6 million; and the University of Michigan has 7.8 million. Oxford's main library alone has more than 6.5 million books. Harvard, Stanford, and the New York Public Library have agreed only to pilot projects with the company. Google will initially scan subsets of their collections, and decisions about whether to proceed with the rest will come later. Oxford will allow Google to scan only books published before 1900...Officials at the University of Michigan, however, have agreed to allow all of their books to be scanned, and the effort has been quietly under way for months....So far, Google Print is separate from the company's Google Scholar search engine, which lets users search academic materials. "But the products may be potentially integrated in a variety of interesting ways," said Ms. [Susan] Wojcicki [director of product management for Google]....Michigan will store a copy of the digitized collection -- which takes up "hundreds of terabytes," Mr. Wilkin said -- for its own uses. Paul N. Courant, the university's provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said the digital collection would be used "to the maximum extent permitted by law." He envisions students and researchers getting access to works in the public domain from their home computers. He also sees the university library setting up a catalog in which the entire collection is searchable down to the level of individual words and phrases. He said a project like this was worth "hundreds of millions" of dollars to the university. "This is an important moment in the history of libraries," he said, "and an important moment in the history of scholarship." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2004 09:05:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
