In August 2010, the University of Chicago Library began sending books and journals to be digitized as part of the Google Book Search Project. The University of Chicago is a member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which will be loaning as many as 10 million volumes to Google for digitization.
The Library’s participation in the Google Book Search Project will benefit the University of Chicago community, as well as researchers and readers around the world. By opening our collections to Google for digitization, we will:
During the course of this partnership, we anticipate the digitization of up to 1 million volumes from our collection.
Under the terms of our partner agreement with Google as a member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), out-of-copyright materials digitized from the University of Chicago collections will be available as viewable full text within a few months of scanning in HathiTrust. Out-of-copyright materials are also fully viewable in Google Book Search. Materials still protected by copyright are discoverable but not viewable in Google Book Search.
Items being scanned by Google will be unavailable to our community for only short periods of time—usually 6 weeks or less. During that time, users will be able to place an interlibrary loan request for these items. Library staff members are more than happy to assist individuals with this process.
During the initial two to three years of the project, materials will be selected from the science and medical collections of the John Crerar Library, from the fields of astronomy, agriculture, natural history, chemistry, physics, geology, paleontology, clinical and research medicine, and the history of technology, science and medicine.
Subsequently, we will provide material from the Library's other extraordinary collections, currently housed in the Joseph Regenstein Library and the D'Angelo Law Library.
For more information, see the CIC Google project information page.
The University of Chicago is providing books and journals from our collection for digitization. Google brings expertise in search technology and mass digitization. The Library will cover staff costs for paging and packaging books for shipment to Google, as well as for reshelving returned volumes. Google will cover costs of transporting, scanning and making digitized content available online.
Google staff members will digitize items at a Google regional scanning facility.
The Library is prioritizing the digitization of collections that are central to research and teaching at the University of Chicago and those that are of particular interest to communities outside the University with input from Google regarding their uniqueness in the database. The materials selected will comprise a significant portion of up to 10 million volumes to be digitized from across all CIC library systems. The strength and depth of the Library’s collections in the sciences and medicine, and the widespread acceptance of digitized forms in these fields make these collections a logical place to begin.
Library staff members will use their expert judgment to determine whether a book would be damaged by scanning. While we seek to digitize as many items as possible, we will not provide items that might be harmed by the process.
Because we recognize the enduring value of physical materials, the University of Chicago will retain the print copies of books that are digitized. The books will be returned to circulation after being scanned.
The University of Chicago is strongly committed to respecting copyright law.
Materials in the public domain (mainly materials with publication dates of 1923 or earlier) are available to the general public through Google. This will be part of Google Books; see http://books.google.com/ for more about the services offered. In addition, the full text of public domain materials digitized from our collection will be available to all via the HathiTrust.
Google is displaying snippets of copyrighted materials online in ways that adhere closely to appropriate copyright protections.
For more information about the Google Library Project, please see http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html
Contact Rachel Rosenberg at ra-rosenberg@uchicago.edu.
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