Princeton library joins Google project to digitise books

February 6, 2007

Princeton University has decided to join Google's project to digitise the book collections of major libraries to enable online searches of the texts, becoming the 12th major library to partner with Google.

The officials from Google stated that Princeton University is to digitize about 1 million public domain books. These books are no longer under copyright.

Princeton's 250 years old library has a collection of more that 6 million printed works, as well as about 5 million manuscripts and around 2 million nonprint items.

Together with Princeton's library system Google is to determine specific parts of the collection that will afterwards be digitized.

Google's is rather young, being introduced in late 2004. It started with a group of several major library systems. Among them there were: New York Public Library, and several academic libraries of Harvard, Oxford, and the.

The second flow encompassed library systems from the, which was later followed by the and. Among others to join the second round were the universities of, Madison, and.

The works that remain covered by the copyright law were digitized only at the libraries of Michigan and Texas. Google was sued in October 2005 by several major U.S. publishers. While the case is yet to come to trial, the publishers' goal is to block Google's plans to make a storage of copyrighted works that is free-to-use.