Saturday, January 20, 2007

University of Texas Joins Google Books

The University of Texas at Austin - the fifth largest academic library in America - becomes the latest major research library to join Google's Book Project; at least one million volumes from the UT collections will be digitized. A major focus of the digitized UT collections will be books from the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, which "chronicles the rich history, politics and society of the region and includes the works of notable Latin American authors."

Fred Heath, vice provost and director of libraries at UT, says of the move "Intellectual discovery is at the heart of the scholarly research process. The best collections of information are only as useful as the quality of the tools available for discovering and accessing that information. Joining with Google’s Book Search program will mean that the intellectual content of our collections are discoverable by a much wider range of scholars and students."