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Digitalized Books by Google and U.C.

The University of California, which is also working with a team led by Yahoo, Microsoft and the Internet Archive, is joining Google`s library-book scanning project. In the project, Google will be scanning and digitizing millions of books from the University of California`s more than 100 libraries across its 10 campuses and making those titles fully searchable.

Google has been working on the scanning and digitalizing books since last year, to make searchable public domain and copyright-protected books from the university collections of the Library of Congress, Oxford, Harvard and Stanford universities, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. U.C. officials are already having books digitized as part of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), which is led by the nonprofit Internet Archive, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Jennifer Colvin, strategic communications manager at the California Digital Library, which works on digitization projects for the U.C. school system, said she saw no conflict or problems with the school system working with two seemingly competing scanning projects. She said: "We value our partnership with the OCA. As a public institution, we believe in making our materials as widely and freely available as possible."