A recent article in the New Yorker magazine by Jeffrey Toobin chronicles Google’s ambitious library-scanning endeavor.

Excerpt:
Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment.

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won’t say how many books are in its database, but the site’s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.

No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. “It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot.”

To read the article in it’s entirety: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin

Related news item:
Princeton U. Library Latest to Join Google Scan Plan

Google has signed another university library to participate in its library scan plan, this week announcing an agreement with the Princeton University Libraries to digitize roughly one million books. Under the agreement, Princeton will initially supply only public domain books over the “next six years,” which it says will be indexed and searchable on the web and freely available for download. (Private universities, because they have fewer protections, have been more wary than public ones in testing the limits of copyright laws.) Princeton University Librarian Karin Trainer said joining Google Book Search will “make it easier for Princeton students and faculty to do research” and would also allow Princeton to “share our collection with researchers worldwide.”

Trainer said Princeton librarians will work with Google over the next several months to choose the subject areas to be digitized and the timetable for the scanning. Library staff, faculty, and students also will be able to suggest titles for inclusion. Princeton is the twelfth institution to join the Google Books Library Project, joining Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New York Public Library, the University Complutense of Madrid, and the National Library of Catalonia.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 8, 2007

Search Me?
Google Wants to Digitize Every Book. Publishers Say Read the Fine Print First.

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 13, 2006; Page D01

Excerpt:
STANFORD, Calif. If it is really true that Google is going to digitize the roughly 9 million books in the libraries of Stanford University, then you can be sure that the folks who brought you the world’s most ambitious search engine will come, in due time, for call number E169 D3.

Google workers will pull Lillian Dean’s 1950 travelogue “This Is Our Land” — the story of one family’s “pleasant and soul-satisfying auto journey across our continent” — from a shelf in the second-floor stacks of the Cecil H. Green Library. They will place the slim blue volume on a book cart, wheel it into a Google truck backed up to the library’s loading dock and whisk it a few miles southeast to the Googleplex, the $100 billion-plus company’s sprawling, campuslike headquarters in Mountain View. There, at an undisclosed location, it will be scanned and added to the ever-expanding universe of digitally searchable knowledge.
Why undisclosed?

Because for one thing, in their race to assemble the greatest digital library the world has ever seen, Google’s engineers have developed sophisticated technology they’d prefer their competitors not see.

And for another, perhaps — though Google executives don’t say so directly — the library scanning program already has generated a little too much heat.

To read the full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/12/AR2006081200886.html

U. of California System’s 100 Libraries Join Google’s Controversial Book-Scanning Project

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. Google officials say they plan to add even more academic libraries to the program in the near future.

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.

Other participants in the Google project, which began in December 2004, include Harvard University, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford, in England. The Library of Congress is taking part in a pilot stage of the project as well.

Some publishers and authors are challenging the project because the company plans to scan not only books in the public domain but also those on which copyright has not run out. Google has defended the legality of the project, stressing that its search results will offer only short excerpts from copyrighted books unless longer excerpts are authorized by a book’s publisher. Publishers and authors argue that Google must obtain permission before scanning a copyrighted work.

To read the full article, go to:
http://chronicle.com/free/2006/08/2006080901t.htm (accessible only to UI affiliates, or subscribers of the Chronicle of Higher Education)
Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 9, 2006

In Defense of Google’s Book-Scanning Project

“The nation’s colleges and universities should support Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online,” writes Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, in an editorial for The Washington Post. “It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country.” Google’s endeavor has drawn criticism from publishers, who have argued that the book-scanning project amounts to a violation of copyright law. But Mr. Ekman, who serves on the advisory boards of two university presses, argues that “those of us who are researchers and readers of books and articles ought to be disturbed by the loss of trust among publishers and libraries, which a decade ago embraced technological innovation and collaboration.” Mr. Ekman takes an optimistic view of the digitization project’s impact on scholarship:

Read theWashington Post article:
The Books Google Could Open
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/21/AR2006082101149.html

The Wired Campus, A service of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug.22, 2006

Scholarship and Academic Liraries (and their kin) in the World of Google

Abstract
The prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university–based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness.

To read the full article, go to: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_8/courant/index.html

by Paul N. Courant, First Monday, Volume 11, Number 8 — 7 August 2006