The University of California system has joined Google's controversial book-digitization project, and the partnership is expected to convert millions of books from the system's 100 libraries -- even volumes that are protected by copyright -- into fully searchable electronic texts....
The university system is the seventh major participant to join Google's ambitious effort to add digital versions of books to its popular online search engine, and the first full partner to join since two groups of publishers sued to stop the company from scanning any books still covered by copyright.
"We're comfortable that the activity is fully respectful of copyright law," said Daniel Greenstein, executive director of the California Digital Library, a division of the university system....Some library partners in the program, such as Harvard, have sidestepped the controversy by deciding to allow only out-of-copyright books to be scanned by Google. But the University of California has decided to allow copyrighted books to be scanned. The University of Michigan is also allowing copyrighted books to be scanned, but it made that decision before lawsuits had been filed challenging the practice....
Officials would not say how many books would be scanned or how the books will be chosen. But the number of volumes "could go into the millions," said Mr. Greenstein. He said scanning should begin "in the next several weeks."...
The word used by officials at both Google and the university to describe the project's benefits for academe is "discoverability." Allowing scholars to search the full texts of millions of books quickly, officials argue, will make it possible for researchers to discover books that might help their research but that they wouldn't have known about otherwise. That, in turn, "will allow library users to make connections between information and ideas that were hitherto inaccessible, driving the pace of scholarly innovation and enhancing the use of our great libraries," according to a fact sheet prepared by the university about the project.
Adam M. Smith, group business-product manager for Google's book-search project, said in an interview that the company is in talks with other libraries as well. "We are actively in dialogues with other university and academic libraries that have interesting special collections," he said, adding that some of the libraries are in other countries. "Hopefully, in a short time here, we'll be able to announce some additional libraries located outside of the United States."
Why keep adding institutions when some of the world's largest libraries are already involved? "We have the higher-level objective of creating a product where users can search the full text of all the world's books in a single place," Mr. Smith said.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/09/2006 02:48:00 PM.
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.
