Martha Sites can envision a time when the vast materials in the world’s libraries are simply a click away. As an Associate of Production & Technology Services at the UVA Library, Sites has spent her career trying to make reading and learning more accessible. And she wants UVA to be at the forefront.
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“We got the notion to digitize our entire materials around 1996,” says Sites. She started to estimate the cost for such a project, but says she stopped counting when she reached $7.5 million. “A grant that size would not have gotten us nearly through our collection.”
So when UVA announced its participation in the Google Book Library Project in November 2006, it was cause for celebration. UVA joined Harvard, Stanford, the University of California, Oxford and the University of Michigan, among other prominent libraries around the world, to make its rare book collection accessible through the Google Books online site.
“The initial agreement called for 500,000 books in our collection over five years,” says Sites. “We’ve exceeded our target.” The UVA Library’s collection totals 5.1 million books.
“The goal is not the number of books or a particular collection,” says Ben Bunnell, Google’s Library Partnerships manager. “UVA contributes significantly to our shared goal of digitizing the world’s books and making them available to anyone with an Internet connection.” Bunnell says Google’s scanned book collection now numbers more than 15 million titles.
The Google Book Library Project was announced in 2004, and was almost immediately recognized for its unprecedented ambition to assemble what is intended to be the largest corpus of collected works. By the end of 2010, Google estimated that it had already scanned around 10 percent of the approximately 130 million unique books in the world, with the majority of scanned works being out of print or unavailable commercially.
Yet the project has been continually criticized for its apparent copyright violations. In 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed civil suit against the online giant, claiming copyright infringement. A settlement was reached in late 2008.
What has all of this meant to the UVA partnership?
“They don’t affect us at all,” says Sites. “What you actually see through their search is the public domain material. We’re sending them both public domain and current copyrighted materials. But as I understand it, Google can only make that available online if the copyright holder grants them that right.”
This isn’t the only opportunity the University has had to digitize its rare and unique materials. “Since 1992, the UVA Library has been making public domain works freely available online,” says University Librarian Karin Wittenborg.
More recently, UVA has handed off to Google a unique collection of rare Tibetan works, as well as the entire run of Corks and Curls, the University’s yearbook, from 1888 to 2008. None of the scanning for the Google Book partnership is done at the University. The library pulls the books, catalogues what is going out and sends the books off (to “a secure facility run by Google and approved by UVA,” according to the project website) in two-week cycles. One shipment returns for every shipment that goes out. According to Sites, very little damage has been done to any of the library’s books.
At present, the project shows no sign of slowing down. “There are people from the Outback of Australia to the most rural parts of Virginia that have viewed our materials online,” says Sites. “That’s really the best part of what we do: Offer access to books that might not otherwise be seen.”