Twelve-University consortium Joins Google Digitization Project

The Google Book project is now in the process of digitizing over 10 million volumes of the most distinctive collections from twelve midwestern research universities. The twelve universities form the consortium Committee on Institutional Coooperation (CIC).

The universities taking advantage of Google's digitization project will now have increased access to a vast array of materials. Both public domain and copyrighted materials will be searchable. Copyrighted materails will follow copyright law and yield basic information on the item. Public domain materials can be viewed or downloaded for printing. Digitization of the collections will also provide more in-depth access to historically significant print resources - once feared to be lost.

The CIC is going to create a shared repository to collectively archive and manage the public domain materials of the twelve libraries. The shared repository gives faculty and students easy access to a diverse online library whereas information was previously housed in separate locations and could only be accessed through online catalogs and inter-library loans.

The digitization project benefits researchers as they will have greater access to more materials shared between the CIC libraries. Reseachers will be able to customize their searches and retrieve information at a faster rate rather than waiting for print materials to become available.

Indiana University
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/5780.html



NetLibrary Now Part of the EBSCO Publishing Family of Products

NetLibrary launched the eBook category and has grown to become the main eContent provider of numerous libraries inluding academic, medical, corporate, community colleges, etc. NetLibrary supports the most content from leading publishers and the widest range of media type.

Librarians across the country have requested that EBSCO, a leading research platform with the greatest accessibility and usability, incorporate the use of eBooks. eBooks have grown in popularity for research for many reasons.

Now, EBSCO and NetLibrary are joining together to create one-stop researching on EBSCO. I cannot help but think how valuable this will be to researchers. Researchers will be able to access greater resources using one site versus searching several sites.

NetLibrary

http://company.netlibrary.com/aboutus.aspx

User-Centered Spaces

The University of Chicago is a member of the Committe on Institutional Cooperation. In July of 2010, the library was set to deliver its first collection to the Google Book Search Project for digitization. The University provides several reasons for its participation in digitizing including; increasing access to e-books and e-journals, enhancing the discovery of University collections, preserving intellectual content contained in print materials, and placing digitized copies of books and journals in joint repositories thus creating the potential for new types of scholarship. The University assures students that Google has experise in search technology and mass digitization. Google will handle the cost of transporting, scanning, and making content available online while the University covers the cost of staff for packaging books and journals. The University stated that it will start with its medical collection since the use of e-books and e-journals is becoming the preferred method of research.

The following link provides information from the University of Chicago on its digitization effort:
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/about/googlebooks.html