Twelve Research Libraries Join Google Library

-- Publishers Weekly, 6/7/2007 7:27:00 AM

The two lawsuits filed against Google’s library scanning project, and outcries from the publishing community, have not stopped the company from signing additional libraries to take part in the program, and yesterday Google announced another deal, this one with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. CIC is a consortium of 12 research universities, all based in the Midwest (most are members of the Big 10 conference). Google will work with the CIC to digitize select collections across all of its libraries, a process that could include as many as 10 million volumes. It wasn’t clear at press time whether the initiative will involve only public domain works, although the Google release did note that for copyrighted materials, browsers will only see a snippet of the book.

Under the arrangement, Google will provide the CIC with a digital copy of public domain materials digitized for the project, which the consortium will use to create a shared digital repository. "This library digitization agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education," said CIC chairman Lawrence Dumas, provost of Northwestern University, one of the CIC members.