By SCOTT CARLSON
A mere two months after the University of California begins its book-digitization project with Google, the university will provide the search company with as many as 3,000 books a day for scanning.
That nugget, and many others, can be found in a confidential contract under which California joined Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library, in the search-engine company’s elaborate and controversial library-digitization effort.
The six-year contract was released in part as a response to an open-records request from The Chronicle.
According to the document, the university will provide at least 2.5 million volumes to Google for scanning, starting with 600 books a day and ratcheting up to 3,000 volumes a day within two months. Materials pulled for scanning are to be back on the shelves of their libraries within 15 days.
The contract offers clues to the scale of Google’s ambition. “It is simply stunning that they can work with 3,000 books a day,” said Prudence S. Adler, associate executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, after reviewing the contract.
Read the complete Chronicle of Higher Education article.
Posted by Lorene Lavora
