The libraries here at Penn State have their share of rare and important books. As time wreaks havoc on the paper these books are printed on, it is important they are preserved in a digital format.

Enter Google Books.

I know you’ve all seen it. You’re searching for a book on Google and a link to the book appears in your search results. Thinking you hit the jackpot: the full book online, fo free, you click on it, only to see that you can only read a few pages. Anyway, its a great effort by Google to digitize the books of the world.

This month, the first shipment of Penn State’s books are getting the Google treatment.

Lisa German, assistant dean for technical and collections services, explains that, “this initiative supports our strategic planning goals of accelerating the transition to a digital collection and achieving our goals through partnership and collaboration. To this end, selected books from all of Penn State’s campuses will be scanned and added to the Google database.”

When complete, the multi-year project will have digitized upwards of 10 million books from the collections of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the Big Ten Conference.

This is a good move. While I know some are wont to support the Google hegemon, preserving these books is a very important and noble mission. I wonder if @psulibs has anything to say about it?

[Source]