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Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database

By JOHN MARKOFF
and EDWARD WYATT

Here is some extracts from the New York Times's article

Google,announced today that it had entered into agreements with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

The collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library....and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by next April.

The agreements announced today will allow Google to publish the full text of only those library books old enough to no longer be under copyright.

For copyrighted works, Google would scan in the entire text, but make only short excerpts available online."

Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford's collection and the seven million at Michigan. The Harvard project will initially be limited to only about 40,000 volumes. The scanning at Bodleian Library at Oxford will be limited to an unspecified number of books published before 1900, while the New York Public Library project will involve fragile material not under copyright that library officials said would be of interest primarily to scholars.

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