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Google to unlock libraries

Stefanie Olsen CNET News

Published: 14 Dec 2004 09:50 GMT

Google will expand its ability for searching books by working with Oxford, Stanford and Harvard Universities, among others, to digitise out-of-print and copyrighted works.

On Tuesday, the Mountain View, California-based company is expected to announce relationships with five major libraries, including the Oxford University and the New York Public Library, to create digital copies of some books so that they may be searchable using Google. Also on Tuesday, the company will begin sampling some works already scanned for Google Print, the company's searchable index of books that it formally unveiled in October.

Susan Wojcicki, Google's director of product management, said the project will evolve over several years.

"Libraries have been the keepers of information for centuries," she said. "We're excited to unlock that wealth of information."

For now, the scope of Google's relationship with each institution varies. For example, Harvard Publications Director Peter Kosewski said the university is in a pilot programme with Google to scan only 40,000 randomly selected books from its collection of 15 million, the largest academic library in the United States dating to the 1630s. By going through the process, Harvard will be able to vet issues such as care of the books and copyright concerns and determine whether it's appropriate to proceed, he said.

Google has long said it plans to make the world's information accessible and searchable, and a cornerstone to its mission would be to bring libraries to life online. Google itself was borne out of a library digitisation project at Stanford, Wojcicki said, and its founders had planned all along to build a vast searchable index of books. Only now has the company found the technology and resources to work with libraries to scan their volumes, she said.

Faced with increasing competition from Microsoft, Yahoo and others, Google is also trying to continually differentiate itself in Web search and make its service vital to consumer in new ways. The task is not only in making it easy for consumers to find an obscure travel site on Zimbabwe or track a UPS package, but now it's also in helping a visitor call up and read a work of Shakespeare.

Still, the company must navigate tricky issues of copyright. Because libraries own only copies of copyrighted books and don't hold the rights to reproduce those works for wide distribution, Google will likely have to deal with publishers to share revenue on advertising, excerpt only a small portion of material or promote the purchase of books on third-party sites such as Amazon, all of which Google said it plans to do. The company said that at first, it will only display biographical information for copyrighted works.

For books in the public domain -- books no longer protected by copyright -- Google will allow people to search and read the entirety of the work. Oxford, for example, has agreed to let Google scan all of its books published in and before 1900.

New York Public Library has agreed to a pilot programme with Google, granting rights to scan an undisclosed number of books. Stanford and the University of Michigan have given Google the go-ahead to digitise their entire libraries, which Google estimated at seven million volumes each.

Many universities tout exclusive collections of books or letters, and for this reason, Google may also run into trouble obtaining clearances down the road to meet its goals. Harvard's Kosewski said that its test is only with a small number of books and that it would require an entirely new set of considerations if the university were to grant Google or others the ability to scan such works.

"The potential to serve people worldwide is without question," Kosewski said. "We have to ensure that the collections can be taken very good care of."

Google's project coincides with another academic pursuit. The company only recently introduced Google Scholar, a service for searching academic papers such as theses or abstracts. A commercial outfit that sells access to similar materials recently sued Google over its new programme.

The library project builds on Google's previously released print service, which when launched, focused largely on digitising works from publishers, including Random House and Knopf Publishing Group. The company recently invited any publisher to scan their books for inclusion in the index.

The service lets Web surfers call up brief excerpts from books, critic reviews, bibliographic and author's notes and, in some cases, a picture of the book's cover.

Google makes money from the service by displaying related ads alongside book text, and the company shares the majority of the ad revenue with publishers.

Rivals are jockeying for similar utility. Microsoft, for example, has built encyclopaedia answers from its Encarta software into search results for its new proprietary engine. Last year, Yahoo began a content-acquisition project to digitise more searchable material. And Amazon.com features a search-inside-the-book tool so that people can browse works digitally before buying.