Google Books turns a new page at Princeton University

 

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Posted on 6 Feb 2007 at 11:44

Google has signed up another venerable institution, Princeton University in the States, to share the content of its libraries with Google Book Search.

Google's controversial plan, to digitise and archive for search purposes all the world's books and historical documents, has advanced a stage further with another Ivy League recruit.

It had originally co-opted four university libraries at Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan, and these were followed more recently by the University of California, the University Complutense of Madrid and the National Library of Catalonia among others. Google has also signed deals with the New York Public Library, as well as some major publishers.

According to Princeton University's own publication - The Daily Princetonian - the parties have agreed a six-year deal, making the full text of one million books available online via Google Book Search.

'After our staff selects the books to be digitised, assesses their physical condition to make sure they are sound enough to be scanned and checks them out to Google in our online circulation system, the books will be loaded onto Google trucks for shipping to one of their several scanning sites,' said University Librarian Karin Trainer. 'We haven't yet worked out an exact shipping schedule, but we expect the books to be gone only for a number of weeks.'

Started in 2004 with the daunting goal of indexing every book ever published, Google's Book Search has been dogged by controversy. Particularly, Google has been accused in the past of not respecting the rights of original copyright holders. This will be why the deal with Princeton explicitly covers only works that are in the public domain

For example, in October last year, French publishers backed a lawsuit aimed at stopping Google from digitising copyright works for its Book Search service.

'We know that Google is powerful, but they have to show some respect for books,' a spokeswoman for the Syndicat National de l'Edition said.

The French National library also railed against Google's plans.

The President of the National Library of France, Jean-Christmas Jeanneney, said that by concentrating on making overwhelmingly English-language books available through the Google Print project, the Internet's culture would be skewed towards an Anglo-Saxon cultural view of the world.

You can find the beta Google Book Search here.

Author: Alun Williams