...from: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/an-elephant-backs-up-googles-librar...
October 13, 2008, 6:17 PM An Elephant Backs Up Google’s Library By MIGUEL HELFT Google often says that it likes to take the long-term view of things. But Google’s idea of long term does not appear to be long enough for some librarians, who tend to equate long term with forever, at least when it comes to preserving books.
On Monday, a group of major libraries that are participating in Google’s Library Project, said they are working together to create what amounts to a publicly accessible backup of the digital library that Google is creating. The project, which is called HathiTrust, includes libraries at 12 Midwestern universities like the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois, plus the 11 libraries of the University of California system. (Hathi is Hindi for “elephant,” an animal that is said to never forget.)
In the Google Books Library Project, the Internet giant has been scanning the collections of several large libraries. The company gives users access to the complete text of books that are in the public domain, and to snippets of books that are protected by copyrights. Google also gives each library a copy of the books it digitized from that library.
“Google is an excellent partner,” Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan, said in an interview. “They are a corporation with a responsibility to its stockholders. Google could last 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years. We are academic institutions with a commitment to the preservation and use of scholarship and the scholarship record for the indefinite future.”
Mr. Courant said that the majority of the 2 million or so volumes already in HathiTrust were digitized by Google. HathiTrust also includes fragile and hard-to-find books that the libraries have digitized on their own, he said.
HathiTrust is an agreement by several of those libraries — but not all of them — to pool their digital copies into one giant database that will be accessible online. It will not make snippets of copyrighted works available, as some authors and book publishers said that amounts to copyright violations, but will allow users to search those texts.
“I am hoping others will join, and I am hoping that we will be a destination for hundreds of thousands of people on the Web,” Mr. Courant said. “Google will probably be better than we are at large- scale consumer applications.” But Mr. Courant said that for some services aimed at scholars “we’ll be as good or better than them at that.”