Library in Spain Joins Google's Book-Digitization Project

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/09/2006092702t.htm Wednesday, September
27, 2006


Leading University Library in Spain Joins Google's Book-Digitization
Project

By STU WOO


The Complutense University of Madrid announced on Tuesday that it was
joining Google's controversial book-digitization project, giving the
Internet-search giant its first partner in the effort from a
non-English-speaking country. The university will work with Google to
convert hundreds of thousands of works, including books by Miguel de
Cervantes and Pedro Caldern, into fully searchable electronic texts.
Complutense houses Spain's largest university library, with about three
million works in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, and Latin. A
spokeswoman for Google said the company "was thrilled" with the new
partnership, saying that students and researchers with an interest in
Spanish would gain from the move.

Complutense joins Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Oxford, in England, and the
University of California system, as well as the New York Public Library,
in the company's ambitious project to digitize every book in the world.
Google is facing criticism and lawsuits from publishers unhappy with the
company's decision to digitize copyrighted texts, but Complutense is
avoiding that issue by allowing only the public-domain works in its
collection to be scanned in to Google's database.

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