The University of Iowa is partnering with Internet search engine giant Google to make library materials available on-line. As part of the Google Search Project, books and periodicals will be digitized and scanned to allow greater access to the public. U-of-I librarian Nancy Baker says older material will be preserved with the new technology.
Baker says the move will help the Iowa City institution "reproduce the content of some books that are in danger of being lost because they’re 19th century materials and it’s on paper that isn’t so good. We do want to make sure these things are both accessible and available over time." She says the agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education.
Baker says they’ll also get a lot of material scanned in a way that could not have been afforded in the past. The U-of-I joins eleven other research institutions that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation — the academic arm of the Big Ten Conference. More than ten-million volumes of library material will be scanned from the libraries.