UT, Princeton Join Google Scan Plan

Texas offers Latin American titles; LC to digitize “brittle books”

By Andrew Albanese & Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 3/1/2007

The University of Texas (UT) at Austin and Princeton University have reached agreements to become Google’s newest partners in its controversial digitization project. Google will digitize “at least one million volumes” from the UT Libraries, working from a selection list prepared by the libraries that will include both books in the public domain, which will be freely viewable online, and books still under copyright, for which only index information and “snippets” will be viewable.

Google officials lauded UT’s “unique set of rare books and manuscripts” in its Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, citing “special concentrations on Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the countries of the Rio de la Plata and Central America.”

Princeton’s agreement also covers roughly one million books, but the library will initially supply only public domain titles. (Private universities, because they have fewer legal protections, have been more wary than public institutions in testing the limits of copyright law.)

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Library of Congress (LC) a $2 million grant for a program to digitize thousands of public domain works, especially at-risk “brittle books” and U.S. history volumes. The “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress” project goes beyond scanning to encompass “suitable page-turner display technology, capability to scan and display foldouts, and a pilot program to capture high-level metadata, such as table of contents, chapters/sections and index.” Because previous digitization projects have generally avoided brittle books, this new project will demonstrate best practices for handling and scanning such works.

The Sloan Foundation has also supported the Open Content Alliance (OCA), and this new project will use the OCA’s “Scribe” scanning technology. LC has identified several categories for digitization, including books from the general collection; American history; U.S. genealogy and regimental histories; six collections of rare books; and works of photography.