University of Georgia Partners with Google Books For Digital Access

From the U. of Georgia:

Through a new partnership with Google, about 120,000 of the Libraries’ 4.5 million volumes will be digitized, allowing further access to literary, historic, scientific and reference books and journals through UGA’s library catalog as well as one of the largest digital book collections in the world.

“The University of Georgia Libraries’ collection of 4.5 million volumes is a vast resource for students and scholars at our campuses, and the Google Books partnership extends those benefits to people across the globe,” University Librarian and Associate Provost Toby Graham said. “The ability to search through the full text of these digitized materials will make it even easier for researchers to gain access to the knowledge that helps them to better understand our world.”

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In addition to more modern materials that will be available for preview online, other examples of volumes available in full text include shipping registers from as far back as 1764 and Atlanta city directories dating back to 1870. The project also advances a longstanding effort to provide digital access to state and federal government publications, and free digital access will be available to works by Balzac, Sir Francis Bacon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and other historically significant authors, thanks to UGA Libraries.

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According to the terms of the three-year project, Google will take on the work of scanning the books. UGA Libraries will retain a digital copy, which will be available through its online catalog and the Google Books database, as well as through Hathi Trust, a digital preservation repository led by a consortium of research libraries.

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation