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ISSUES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION:
News for the University of Illinois Community

« University of Illinois is Digitizing Lincoln Books | Main | No Extra Open Access Charges to Publish in the Journal of Experimental Botany »

June 11, 2007

One Million University of Illinois Books to be Digitized by Google

It was announced last week that, as part of the Google Books program, 10 million books from the CIC universities (the eleven Big Ten universities plus the U of Chicago) will be digitized within the next six years! This means that around a million books from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will be digitized -- plus another million from our sister university, the University of Illinois - Chicago.

What Google Books can do for you...
The primary purpose of Google Books is to allow you to search INSIDE THE BOOK! Once you've identified a book that you'd be interested in reading, Google Books conveniently provides links to booksellers and library catalogs.

Some further tidbits --

• The books to be digitized will not be randomly chosen. Rather, areas of distinction from each of the involved universities will be selected. E.g., the Geology collection from the U of I may be chosen for digitization. Or perhaps the Lincoln books. Or Math, or Music, or Agriculture...
  
• Both out of copyright as well as in copyright books will be digitized. Out of copyright books usually means books that are older than 1923; this will probably make up about 20% of the books. For those books that are still under copyright, you may be able to read just snip-its or a few pages. See, What can I view?
  
• You will be able to SEARCH all the text in the books, irregardless of whether they are in or out of copyright
  
• Google does not scan in color at this time.
  
• All the files created from the CIC/Google digitization project will be given to us, so we can make a more robust search engine (and enhance the metadata).
  

Read more about the CIC / Google Books project:
From the CIC. CIC's FAQ. From Google Books. Libraries participating in the Google Books Program.

Give Google Books a try!
Since the time it began in 2004, over a million books have been scanned as part of the Google Books project and are available for searching at the Google Books site. Use the Advanced Search to limit the search to words in the title, to specify the author and date of publication, and much more. Once you've identified a book that you'd be interested in reading, Google Books conveniently provides links to booksellers and library catalogs.

Other digitization projects.
There are many other digitization projects, but none as ambitious or with pocket$ quite as deep as the Google Books project. Here's a partial listing of some you may like to look into:
Illinois Harvest - provides thematic access to digitized and born-digital resources about Illinois, created by Illinois scholars, or included among the digital collections of The University of Illinois Library.
Internet Archive Texts - a part of the broader Internet Archive, an non-profit organization founded with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages
Microsoft's Live Search Books A "competitor" to Google Books, this product has a very nice display, but not robust search options, yet.
Amazon's Search Inside Millions of the books offered for sale by Amazon offer the option to search inside the book and actually read several pages on either side of the search terms that you're interested in.

Posted by Katie Newman at June 11, 2007 12:51 PM

 

For comments on this page contact: Kaite Newman