The Googlization of Everything

Chronicle.com:

A Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan -- and Counting

Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.

Most of the scanning has been done as part of the library's controversial deal with Google. The search giant is working with dozens of major libraries around the world to scan the full text of books to add to its index. But Michigan is one of the only institutions to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright. Some publishers have sued Google for copyright infringement over the scanning effort, though officials from Google say their effort is legal because they are not making the full text of copyrighted books available to the public.

Paul Courant, dean of libraries, wrote on his blog that the achievement is historic. "As far as I know, Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its own collections digitized and available for search (and, when in the public domain, available for viewing)."

Google has refused to release numbers on how many books have been scanned as part of its effort or to reveal which books are part of its index. But officials at Michigan have said that they are getting faster at scanning as they go.

"We all eagerly await (and it won'€™t be long) the next million, and the millions after that," Mr. Courant wrote.

-- Jeffrey R. Young