Harvard Library Shares “Google Books 2020 Update”

From the Harvard Library Blog Post by Claire DeMarco, Associate Director, Digital Strategies and Innovation:

A look back — and forward — at the ongoing partnership between Google and Harvard Library.

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Our partnership with Google is not just about scanning services. It is about an ongoing relationship that seeks to enhance and refine the use of digital surrogates. Between 2004 and 2009, Google scanned 891,164 volumes from Harvard. Google has begun reprocessing those materials, enhancing and correcting the raw images and running them through updated OCR to create better, more searchable, machine-readable text.

As part of this relationship, we are involved in the Google Library Partners group, an active community of our colleagues from peer institutions who also share their materials with Google. As a group we have been able to advocate for and contribute to reviews for handling of materials, quality assurance in scanning, and expanded treatments for items with foldouts or materials of non-traditional size. We have also led a review of how our peers provide access to materials and are actively partnering with HathiTrust to conduct more research into how users find and utilize these materials.

Read the Complete Blog Post (1272 words)

In Other News From Harvard: “This Month in Accessibility: Harvard Library Digital Accessibility Audit Project”

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