Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 12:13 PM
Today we announced either our 16th partnership -- or our 16th through 25th -- depending on how you count.
The Committee on Institutional Collaboration (CIC) is a consortium of University libraries covering all of the Big 10 schools and the University of Chicago. We're now pleased to add books from the collections of 10 new CIC representatives to the project, along with the collections of the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (both of which are existing GBS partners and CIC members).
This is our first agreement with a consortium of this type, and it brings with it new opportunities. The collective libraries of the CIC hold more than 78,000,000 volumes -- ranging from Northwestern University's Africana collection to the Central Eurasian history collection at Indiana University, to the University of Minnesota's excellent collection of works on bee-keeping-- the list goes on.
In addition, as part of this agreement, the CIC libraries are creating a "shared digital repository," so that out-of-copyright books from any of the institutions can be easily accessed by any scholar regardless of geographic location. In essence, the repository will become both a "common good" for the consortium's 400,000 faculty and students, and a "public good" for the general public. This repository is the first of its kind, and is a great example of what libraries, working together, can accomplish.
No matter how you count it, this agreement holds tremendous promise for Google, our partners and our users. We strive to help people find all the world's books online, and today represents one more step toward that goal.
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