NEWS
MSU and 11 other schools announced today an agreement with Google Inc. to make millions of volumes from the schools' libraries available and searchable online.
The 11 other schools are part of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, or CIC, including all Big Ten schools and The University of Chicago.
The Google Book Search project is an initiative that would eventually index all of the world's books, said Adam Smith, product management director for Google Book Search, in a conference call.
Google will digitally scan both in-copyright materials and public domain, staying consistent with copyright law.
Smith said Google already has more than a million books that are searchable by full text online.
Instead of books only being searchable by key words, users can scan the entire text of the book.
In copyright instances, the user will be able to tell if the word appears in a book and where they may purchase or borrow that book, said Clifford Haka, director of MSU libraries.
"We've never been able to search every word in a volume, and that's what this allows," he said.
The collection will be a tremendous digital reserve available for faculty, staff and students, and for the broader public, CIC Director Barbara Allen said.
"In a way, it shows the bold vision these academic leaders have for sharing resources across these campuses," she said.
Some of MSU's collections that may be considered for inclusion in the project - ultimately decided by Google - are the agriculture, turfgrass, Africana, Canadiana and Russel B.
