The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has announced a partnership with Google to digitize 10 million books over six years.

From the press release [pdf]:

The CIC is a consortium of 12 research universities including University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“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. “We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve and index the world’s printed treasures.”

The project will also provide broader and more in-depth access to historically significant print resources.

Google will have the opportunity to scan some of the most distinctive collections from the CIC’s holdings, now over 75 million volumes.

As a part of the agreement, the consortium also will create a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository to collectively archive and manage the full content of public domain works digitized by Google that are held across the CIC libraries.

From the CIC FAQ page:

Does the Agreement include both public domain and in copyright works?

Yes. The digitization initiative will include both public domain and in-copyright materials in a manner consistent with copyright law.

For books in the public domain, readers will be able to read, download and print the full texts from the Google site. In addition, the consortium will build a shared digital

repository for all 12 universities’ digitized public domain materials so the holdings can be collectively archived and made available to faculty, students and the broader public.

Book Patrol picks out some of the terms of the agreement:

-The CIC makes at least a 10,000,000 volume commitment.
-Google “reserves final discretion over which Available Content it will Digitize.”
-Google shall own all rights to their copy and can use it at their discretion.
-Google will digitize both in-copyright and out-of-copyright material. The out of copyright material will be readily available to the CIC and the public.
and the kicker- Google will hold the in-copyright material in digital escrow until either they get permission from the copyright holder or the material enters the public domain.

Hmm - hold the in-copyright material in digital escrow - now that’s an interesting angle to get around the copyright laws.

Making available digitized public domain materials to the broader public must surely be welcomed by all.  The value in information is only realized when people have access to it, use it, and build upon it.

Getting to that digitized information, from the indexed full text held by Google, will be easier than it is to get to the physical books now.  I wonder how much easier it would be if the library metadata, assembled over the years by cataloguers, was brought in to play alongside Google’s secret indexing sauce.

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