Want to pull a book off the shelves of Green Library without leaving your office chair? Soon, you will be able to—assuming its copyright has expired.
Under a pilot program with Google, the web company founded by former Stanford doctoral students Larry Page, MS ’98, and Sergey Brin, MS ’95, hundreds of thousands (or more) of the University’s 7.5 million books will be scanned, digitized and made searchable. Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library also have agreed to have some or all of their volumes digitized. “Some people seem to believe the effect will be to make the physical books redundant—that we can simply discard the books and convert our book stacks to offices and labs,” says University librarian Michael Keller. “I disagree strongly. In fact, I believe having books in digital form will actually increase the use of the physical books. The digital files will be great for searching and targeting material for study, but many of us prefer the hard-copy original in hand for careful reading.”
Stanford will loan books to Google, which will scan them without removing bindings or harming the volumes, then return them to campus to be reshelved. For copyrighted works, Google will display bibliographic information and tell the user how many times the search term appears and on which pages. The search engine will provide complete texts of older books that are in the public domain.
