From a Chronicle of Higher Ed. Report by Marc Perry:
With the Google project in legal limbo, Indiana University and the University of Illinois are moving forward with plans to set up a similar research center [HathiTrust Research Center for Computational Access to Archives] built around the archive maintained by the HathiTrust Digital Library, which was created by a consortium of universities, in part, to establish a stable backup of the books that Google digitized from their libraries. The new research center will initially focus on works that are no longer protected by copyright—roughly 2.3 million books in HathiTrust’s 8-million-plus collection.
“Right now, the safe path is working with the public-domain materials,” said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust. “That’s a phenomenally large amount of material.”
Here’s a Link to an INFOdocket Post (4/18/2011) With Full Text of Official Announcement