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December 6th, 2024
Purdue Libraries, as a result of its membership in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), has partnered with Google to digitize books in its collection that are rare, out of print, and generally unavailable and are no longer needed in print at its facilities. Google aims to digitize these books from libraries across the world and make them searchable on Google Books to promote accessibility and advance the knowledge of users worldwide.
In September 2021, Libraries began the process of sending books to Google in test shipments to solidify logistics and project workflow. The project officially began in March 2022, and Libraries selected and sent over 40,000 books to Google to be digitized until October 2023. The project was then paused to categorize and move books to Libraries’ repository, and will restart in May 2025.
More about the project
The Google Library Project makes it possible for users to search through millions of books written in different languages via Google Books. If a book from the Library Project is in the public domain, Google will make it fully available to the public to read in its entirety. If a book is not in the public domain, the book will still be text-searchable, but Google Books will only display a few lines of text to show the user where their search appears within the context of the book.
Sometimes rights holders of copyrighted books grant permission to show more than a few lines of text; in those cases, a percentage of pages from the book or the entire book may be available for viewing. Also, if a book exists but has yet to be digitized, basic bibliographic information about the book will be available for users to view.
Google works with a number of libraries throughout the world to digitize their collections—once digitized, the libraries also receive a copy to preserve and make available to their patrons as copyright law allows. To learn more about the Google Library Project, visit its website.