Penn State University Libraries - Google Books Project at Penn State

In June 2007, the Penn State University Libraries joined the other members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in an agreement to digitize select collections across all its libraries, up to 10 million volumes, as part of the Google Book Search project.

The CIC, the academic side of the Big Ten, is a consortium of 12 research universities including Penn State, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"This partnership will allow for library digitization at a scale and scope that would not be possible with the limited means available to the individual university," said Rodney Erickson, Penn State's executive vice president and provost. "This partnership will allow the universities to digitize collections in a few years that would have taken hundreds of years and many millions of dollars. Beyond the scope and speed of digitization made possible by this agreement, the libraries' intention to build a shared digital repository to house public domain materials is a ground-breaking collaboration. The repository will allow faculty, students and the broader public to immediately access the full content of all 12 universities' rich array of public domain holdings."

• Read the full story on Penn State Live
• About the CIC/Google Book Search project
• Project news and commentary
• Project FAQs

By partnering with Google and the CIC, the University Libraries will:

• Provide worldwide access to a vast and varied body of knowledge which is currently bound to the printed page, including many of the libraries' most unique collections
• Enhance the scholarship of, and open up new areas of research for, Penn State faculty and students
• Fulfill Penn State's mission as a land-grant university to, "engage in collaborative activities... to provide access, outreach, and public service to support the citizens of the Commonwealth and beyond."

• Books and other materials from all Penn State campus and subject libraries will be digitized, starting first at University Park and later at other campus locations.
• Long-term, many of the University Libraries' collections will be available full-text online through the CAT, HathiTrust and Google.
• In the short term, books may be unavailable for a period of a few weeks. When a book is being digitized, Penn State faculty and students are encouraged to use the "I Want It" button in the CAT to request a copy through Interlibrary Loan or from another campus location.