Google Accelerates Books Project

Princeton University has joined the Google Books Library Project, as Harvard is set to ramp up the rate at which its own books will be scanned.

The Harvard University Library was one of the first five library systems to join the Google project in 2004, making books in its vast collections available online through Google in digital form.

Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53, the director of the University Library, said that Google would open up a higher-capacity facility for scanning Harvard’s books “very soon.”

“We will increase the volume of books that are going through the scanning,” said Verba.

Google has been scanning Harvard’s books at a secret, undisclosed location for the past two years.

According to Verba, the scanning process had “not been at a very rapid pace, the digital facility we had being relatively small.” Once the expanded facility is in place, Verba said, “we are going to do a larger number of books.”

As of its announcement last week, Princeton is the 12th institution to join the Google Books Library Project, and the only other Ivy League school to have done so besides Harvard.

Karin A. Trainer, Princeton’s university librarian, said that she expected to make about a million books in Princeton’s collection available through Google over the next few years.

“We feel that digitizing our collections would be the best way to make them accessible,” said Trainer.

As at Harvard, the material to be scanned at Princeton will consist of books that are no longer under copyright protection.

Many of Harvard’s books are now available online at the Google Books website, where the Harvard Libraries stamp is visible on the inside covers of scanned books, such as a copy of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” dating to 1900.

Although details about the scanning technology and facility remain unclear, there is evidence to suggest that the Internet is not the only “digital” part of the process. Human fingers holding the books are visible in some of the online images of the scanned material.

Verba said that his goal is to digitize as many of Harvard’s books as possible—eventually all those out of copyright—rather than doing so selectively.

In contrast, Trainer said that Princeton would solicit faculty and student input on picking the fraction of its library collection to be digitized.

Harvard’s libraries, which compose the largest university system in the world, hold more than 15 million volumes, dwarfing the more than 6 million volumes in the Princeton system.

Verba estimates that the out-of-copyright books being scanned may comprise around 20% of Harvard’s collections. However, Verba expressed a hope that eventually it might be possible to expand the project to include copyrighted material.

“As a political scientist, I believe that the copyright laws have become far too restrictive,” said Verba.

Verba also noted that the University of Michigan’s library, another member of the Google Library project, was already scanning copyrighted material because it is a public institution.

Trainer, who is a member of the Harvard libraries’ board of visitors, said that because of the confidentiality of the negotiations with Google she had not conferred with her Harvard colleagues regarding whether or not to join the project.

When asked whether he thought Princeton’s decision to join had been the right one, however, Verba said simply, “yes.”

—Staff writer David Jiang can be reached at djiang@fas.harvard.edu.