By Andrew Albanese

Cornell University has become the 27th library to join the Google Books Library Project. Under terms of the agreement, Google will digitize up to 500,000 works from Cornell's Mann Library and make them available online using Google Book Search. The deal is for a six-year period, during which Cornell will provide Google with both public domain and copyrighted holdings from its collections.

As per Google's policy, if a work has no copyright restrictions, the full text will be available for online viewing. For books protected by copyright, users will just get "snippets" and the book's basic information, such as title, publisher and author. Users will also get information about where they can "buy or borrow a book." 

Google will provide Cornell with a digital copy of each book it scans; those books, Cornell says, will "eventually" be incorporated into the university's own digital library. It was unknown at press time, however, when Cornell would get its library copies. In Google's agreement with the 12 libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, library copies are to be held "in escrow," released only if the work becomes public domain, if the library has gained permission, or if case law allows in-copyright works to be copied and held by the libraries. 

Mann's collections include some of the materials in biological sciences; natural resources; plant, animal, and environmental sciences; applied economics; management and public policy; human development; textiles and apparel; nutrition and food science.

Cornell, meanwhile, is proving to be an equal opportunity scanner, having already entered into a partnership with Google competitor Microsoft to digitize "a significant number" and putting them online through Microsoft's Live Book Search service. That agreement will focus on works in the public domain, and will also provide the library with digital copies of the materials scanned. The library has also partnered with BookSurge, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, to offer print-on-demand (PoD) books from its digitized materials.