Researching your next paper just got easier.

MSU and 11 other universities announced Wednesday an agreement with Google Inc. to make millions of volumes from the schools' libraries available online.

Instead of flipping through thousands of pages to back up your thesis, Google will do the work for you - the full text of the books will be searchable online.

The 11 other schools are part of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, or CIC. It includes all Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago.

Worldwide library

Eventually, the minds behind Google want to put all the world's books online.

"This fits very well with Google's mission, which is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," said Adam Smith, product management director for Google Book Search Project.

Google will digitally scan both in-copyright and public domain materials, staying consistent with copyright law.

Smith said Google will absorb the majority of expenses, costing somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars, with some smaller costs such as retrieving books and preparing them for digitization, taken care of by library partnerships.

Google also has developed a non-damaging scanning technology, Smith said.

For a book that is not in-copyright, usually published before 1923, a user may download the entire book.

If a user searches for a book that's copyrighted, the only things that will show up is basic bibliographic information, key words and information showing users where they may purchase or borrow the book.

Smith said Google has more than a million books already searchable by full text online.

The project will be an extensive digital reserve available for the public, said Barbara Allen, CIC director.

"In a way, it shows the bold vision these academic leaders have for sharing resources across these campuses," she said.

The 12 schools compete with each other intensively for the best students and staff, said Larry Dumas, Northwestern University provost and chair of CIC, but collaboration also is necessary.

"We cannot accomplish all we aspire to accomplish in education and research as isolated individual institutions."

Cover to cover

Never before has it been this easy to search every word in a volume, said Clifford Haka, director of MSU libraries.

Traditionally, a book would be catalogued by the library and have one, two or three subject headings, he said.

"But most books cannot be adequately defined like that," he said.

If somebody was working on a project about alternative sources of energy, he or she would typically not search in a book about coal mining, he said. However, the author may have put a chapter in the back of the book that stated some alternatives to coal that would be considered in the future.

But the book wouldn't get indexed to show that, he said.

Now, the entire text of the book can be scanned by users of the Google Book Search.

"What Google is really accomplishing is developing a massive comprehensive index of finding literature," he said.

Filling in the blanks

In December 2004, Google announced the beginning of the project, partnering with Harvard University, University of Michigan, New York Public Library, Oxford University and Stanford University - forming a collection that exceeded 15 million volumes.

Haka said Google realized there were holes in its digital collection, and began to look elsewhere, especially within the past year.

Google may consider MSU's Agriculture collection, since this area of study isn't offered at U-M.

MSU's collections are especially extensive in turfgrass, Africana, Canadiana and Russel B. Nye Popular Culture collections, Haka said.

"When they're done, they will hopefully have a strong collection in just about everything," he said.

Preview, purchase and peruse

While copyrighted books will not immediately be available to download - Google hasn't completely ruled them out.

Smith said they are working on a program that would allow users to purchase the full text of books online.

After seeing a free preview of the book online, users would pay a fee - determined by the publishers - and download the rest of the book right to their computer, he said.

Nothing lasts forever

Just because it's digitized doesn't mean it will last forever, Haka said.

Electronically storing a book in multiple places helps eliminate the possibility of it disappearing altogether.

Society trusts libraries to organize, archive and preserve culture through books, said Mark Sandler, director of CIC Library Initiatives.

"We hold things that others would say are just not cost effective to keep up," he said. "We know and worry that over time many printed books are threatened by deterioration due to use of poor paper quality or a natural disaster."

Every book has it's own life span, Haka said.

While a book could last for 500 years, he said, with floods, fires and the wear-and-tear of page turning, a book is never guaranteed to stay safe.

"Most people don't want to sit down and read Moby Dick on their computer screen, Haka said. "It's a good reason to still preserve the books."

Colleen Maxwell can be reached at maxwel79@msu.edu.