Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google To Digitize Much of Harvard's Library

Posted by timothy on from the that's-a-lot-of-library dept.

FJCsar writes "According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system, which is second only to the Library of Congress in the number of volumes it contains. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, a FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at hul.harvard.edu."

2 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Will it be like google scholar? by baronben · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Ever since they introduced Google Scholar, I've been wanting something like this for my university. For those of you who don't know, finding articles on a subject can be a pain in the ass, as subjects are indexed on several different systems (depending on subject, date, and journal). None of them, not one, has a decent interface or gets results that are as good as google. Google scholar lets you search through academic texts, but its limited to what's available, usually working papers or pre-published drafts. If there is some way that google could team up with Academic printers to index as many journals and texts as possible, this would make everyone's life a lot better.

    I think this is a great start, There's incredible profit here too, universities spend millions for catalogue systems. If I could use one interface to search for books, chapters, and articles on a subject, I could spend more time actually learning, and less time looking at the same damn "no results" page on GeoWeb. Grrrr.

    --
    Sleep is for the weak!
  2. The Fight against Plagiarism by manmanic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One reason why this is in the interest of big old universities like Harvard is that it will make it much easier to detect plagiarism in students' essays. If published books were included in Google's index, a plagiarism detection service like Copyscape would also be able to check whether content was lifted from printed material, as well as from the web.