Google showed a renewed push in its project to scan the full text of book collections throughout the world this week as the company announced a new partnership with one of the largest public university systems in the country.
The University of California joined with Google in its the Google Book Search Project, to help scan millions of books, the company announced Tuesday. The support of UC and its 100 libraries across 10 campuses is expected to reinvigorate a project that has garnered much controversy since being introduced to the book industry in October 2004 at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Since December 2004, Google has worked to digitize books from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University and the New York Public Library.
“The digitization project furthers UC’s mission,” UC President Robert C. Dynes said in a statement. “It greatly expands our ability to give scholars and the public access to the kinds of information and ideas that drive scholarly innovation and public knowledge and discourse.”
Google had several law suits, both in the United States and abroad, filed against it for copyright infringement. Google pulls excerpts from copyright-protected Web sites to preview their content in Web searches, and book publishers have criticized and condemned the book project for obliging publishers to request that their content not to be used in the project.
- People:
- Robert C. Dynes
- Places:
- United States