Cornell University joins Google Book Search

In a six year deal, Cornell University Library is partnering with Google to digitise materials from its collections and make them available online. The library is the 27th institution to sign up to the project.

Google will digitise up to 500,000 works from Cornell University Library and make them available online using Google Book Search. As a result, materials from the library’s collections will be easily accessible to students, scholars and people worldwide.

Materials from Mann Library, one of 20 member libraries that comprise Cornell University Library, will be digitised as part of the agreement. Mann’s collections include some of the following subject areas:  biological sciences, natural resources, plant, animal and environmental sciences, applied economics, management and public policy, human development, textiles and apparel, nutrition and food science.

‘Mann Library's collections complement the contributions of the other Google library partners,’ said Janet McCue, director of Mann Library. ‘Having Google index our collections is like having a massive concordance to the information in our books.’

The Google Book Search Library Project digitises books from major libraries and makes it possible for internet users to search their collections online. Over the next six years, Cornell will provide Google with public domain and copyrighted holdings from its collections.

If a work has no copyright restrictions, the full text will be available for online viewing. For books protected by copyright, users will just get the basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), at most a few lines of text related to their search and information about where they can buy or borrow a book.

Google will also provide Cornell with a digital copy of all the materials scanned, which will eventually be incorporated into the university’s own digital library.