Google to Digitize Library Collections

Information Management Journal, Mar/Apr 2005

A new project from Google Inc. will allow Internet users to visit some of the world's most prestigious libraries without leaving their homes. The search engine giant has announced a partnership with five university and public libraries to digitize millions of books in their collections and make portions of the text available online for free.

Participating libraries include those at Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library.

Users will be able to type key words into Google's main Web search site to retrieve links to portions of text from library books. The books-related results will appear at the top of the searchresult page. When users click on a book-related result, images of the relevant scanned pages with their search terms highlighted will appear. Google's service also allows users to type in their ZIP code to find out whether books that show up in their search results are owned by their local libraries.

How much of each publication is accessible will depend on copyright restrictions. Books in the public domain will have their full text available through the search engine. For works protected by copyright, Google will show either bibliographic information or snippets of text that appear around a user's search term. When possible, in the search results, Google will point users to libraries where they can access the publications, or to online retail sites where they can purchase copies.

Scanning millions of books, some fragile, is no easy task. According to reports, Google is using its own secret scanning and digitizing technology that it says will not harm older, delicate books. Books will roll into Google's Web search index as they are scanned and digitized. The full text of all publications will be scanned.

Google is picking up the cost of putting online thousands of the New York Public Library's 20 million volumes as part of a pilot project. Books selected for the project will be those no longer covered by copyright and deemed to be of public interest.

Google's program with Harvard, which has 14.6 million volumes, will also begin as a pilot program. Google plans to scan about 40,000 volumes before Harvard decides whether to include its entire collection. Harvard officials said they like the idea of making their books more widely available, but they are concerned about potential damage from the conversion process as well as the possibility that books could be lost.

The University of Michigan is making its entire collection of 7.4 million volumes available to Google for scanning and searching by computer users. Books still covered by their original copyright will be searchable, but only a sentence or two will be accessible via search. Older books in the public domain will be available to be read or searched in their entirety on Google, but they will not be available for printing.

While Google's ambitious project could help millions of Internet users gain access to information once buried deep in library stacks, some question whether a for-profit company should be a gatekeeper for such vast storehouses of knowledge. Also, publishers worry that Google's efforts will hurt book sales. But the participating libraries say online access can be a boon to researchers and a benefit to people who could not otherwise access high-quality collections.