The CIC consists of the 11 universities in the Big Ten Conference—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, and Wisconsin-Madison—plus the University of Chicago. Items chosen for digitization are expected to come largely from the schools’ distinctive collections, such as Northwestern’s Africana holdings, the University of Chicago’s South Asia materials, Indiana’s folklore holdings, and Minnesota’s Scandinavia and forestry collections.
Mark Sandler, CIC director of library initiatives, called the agreement “an important step to preserve and protect the intellectual content of our printed materials for all time.” By making access convenient, “we’re keeping generations of ideas alive,” as well as maintaining libraries’ relevance, he added.
In addition to making their materials publicly available through Google, the consortium will develop a shared digital repository to collectively archive and manage the full content of the digitized public domain works that are held across the CIC libraries.
Two CIC members, the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin-Madison, are already partners in the Google project. The new CIC agreement does not affect or supersede the digitization already underway at those libraries.
Google announced May 23 that Belgium’s Ghent University had joined its Library Project, greatly boosting the number of Dutch- and French-language books available through the initiative.
Posted June 8, 2007.