Peering into Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinth

Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:34 AM

Posted by Matt Werner, Technical Writer, Enterprise

In honor of Jorge Luis Borges's 112th birthday, Google has prepared a special doodle for today. Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentinian author best known today for his fantastic short stories and influential essays and poetry. His ideas have made a lasting impact on fields as far-ranging as mathematics, philosophy, literary theory, translation studies, and studies in cyberculture/futurology.

Google Doodle by Sophia Foster-Dimino

The New York Times piece "Borges and the Foreseeable Future" highlights Borges's surprising influence on the Internet era. Focusing on Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the article shows how Borges's idea of an infinite encyclopedia can be interpreted as a prototype for Wikipedia.

In a similar light, Borges's story "On Exactitude in Science," which is about a map as large as the area it depicts, has a virtual corollary with Google Earth and Google Maps. In "El Aleph", Borges wrote about a single point in space through which all other points in space and time could be seen. The Google search box hasn’t quite reached this breadth, but we are adding to the index everyday.

In The Library of Babel, Borges describes an infinite library that holds every conceivable book, composed of every conceivable combination of letters. This story has left scholars pondering the consequences of this infinite library, and recent titles, like William Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, have set about analyzing the mathematics in Borges’s story.

Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ on Flickr 

Visualizing Borges’s literary legacy

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a tool in Google Books which allows you to search for terms and phrases. Using the tool, you can compare trends in word usage in the millions of books in the Google Books digital corpus. Below are Ngrams showing the trends in the number of books that have "Jorge Luis Borges" in Spanish and English. The graphs go from 1899 (when he was born) to 2000. These graphs show Borges's explosive rise in popularity for Spanish and English-reading audiences.

References to Jorge Luis Borges's name in Spanish-language books in Google Books 1899-2000

References to Jorge Luis Borges's name in English-language books in Google Books 1899-2000

What's interesting about these graphs is how there are Spanish-language books referencing Borges as early as the mid-1920s. However, for English books, Borges's popularity didn't take off until he shared the Formentor Prize, an international literary award, with Samuel Beckett in 1961.

At that point, Borges's popularity in the English-speaking world took off. English translations of his works became more widely available thanks to the efforts of Norman Thomas di Giovanni and other translators, and Borges traveled the world in the later years of his life with Maria Kodama, giving lectures on literature. The number of times Borges's name appears in English books rises sharply in the decade from 1961 to 1971 and continues its upward trend through 2000.

Interestingly, for Spanish books, the frequency of his name dropped soon after his passing in 1986, only to surge from 1990 to 2000. It will be interesting to see in the future, if references to Borges keep rising.

"Of a language of the dawn"

How would Borges, a lover of language known for his exquisite word choice, have used Ngram Viewer? This tool is a step beyond the card catalogue and library indexes he used as a librarian, but is a data visualization tool that allows one to simultaneously peer at and dissect individual words and phrases used in millions of books.

Would Borges have used Ngram Viewer to track trends and the emergence of words in the many languages he knew? Could he have used it to write about the death of one word or language, to be supplanted by another, similar to how he describes the birth of English from Anglo-Saxon in his poem "On Beginning the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar"? Or would he have have used the tool in ways we have not yet imagined?

Want to learn more about Borges and his writing?

Visit Google Books to access ebooks by and about Borges:

• Ficciones 
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
• Jorge Luis Borges: A Personal Anthology
• The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel
• Papers for the Suppression of Reality

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One million books scanned and returned to CIC university libraries

Friday, February 04, 2011 at 7:42 AM

Posted by Kim Armstrong, Deputy Director, Center for Library Initiatives, Committee on Institutional Cooperation

Today we're celebrating an important milestone: Google has digitized one million books from member libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is the consortium of the Big Ten member universities and the University of Chicago.

Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. Once digitized, the books are shipped back to our originating libraries to resume their journeys from bookshelves to backpacks.

While Google preserves library books in digital form, and makes them more accessible to more people as a result, it also sends participating libraries (at no cost to us) digital copies for our own archives or other non-commercial use. Accordingly, the CIC libraries are making hundreds of thousands of the recently digitized public domain volumes accessible through their partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library.

We became Google's 16th Library Project partner in June 2007. Google Books has now partnered with more than 40 libraries and scanned more than 15 million books worldwide. Books that have only been available for use within the walls of our libraries have found new readers now that they are open to the world. Some examples of CIC titles available for reading include: An Unwritten Account of a Spy of Washington, published in 1892; The 1901 Pipe and Quid: An Essay on Tobacco; and The Sun: a familiar description of his phaenomena, published in 1885.

While we are pausing to celebrate this moment with Google today, we're not resting on our library laurels. We have a long way to go to digitize all of our books. In fact, CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. -- so this is just the beginning. Read the full post 0 comments

Google Books goes Dutch

Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 9:15 AM

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnership Development Manager

In recent months, I’ve got to know a group of people in the Hague who are working on an ambitious project to make the rich fabric of Dutch cultural and political history as widely accessible as possible - via the Internet.

That team is from the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), and as of today, we'll be working in partnership to add to the library's own extensive digitisation efforts. We'll be scanning more than 160,000 of its public domain books, and making this collection available globally via Google Books. The library will receive copies of the scans so that they can also be viewed via the library's website. And significantly for Europe, the library also plans to make the digitised works available via Europeana, Europe's cultural portal.

The books we'll be scanning constitute nearly the library's entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection covers a tumultuous period of Dutch history, which saw the establishment of the country's constitution and its parliamentary democracy. Anyone interested in Dutch history will be able to access and view a fascinating range of works by prominent Dutch thinkers, statesmen, poets and academics and gain new insights into the development of the Netherlands as a nation state.

This is the third agreement we've announced in Europe this year, following our projects with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the Austrian National Library. The Dutch national library is already well underway with its own ambitious scanning programme, which will eventually see all of its Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470 onwards being made available online. By any measure, this is a huge task, requiring significant resources, and we're pleased to be able to help the library accelerate towards its goal of making all Dutch books accessible anywhere in the world, at the click of a mouse.

It's exciting to note just how many libraries and cultural ministries are now looking to preserve and improve access to their collections by bringing them online. Much of humanity's cultural, historical, scientific and religious knowledge, collected and curated over centuries, sits in Europe's libraries, and its great to see that we are all striving towards the same goal of improving access to knowledge for all.

Google and other technology companies have an important role to play in achieving this goal, and we hope that by partnering with major European cultural institutions such as the Dutch national library, we will be able to accelerate the rapid growth of Europe's digital library.

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog) Read the full post 0 comments

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 6:27 PM

Posted by Annabella Weisl, Strategic Partner Manager, Google Books

Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian scientist, is an ancestor of modern genetic studies. His paper, Experiments on Plant Hybrids, helped early twentieth century scientists make new discoveries about genetics and hybridity. Several of Mendel’s works now reside in the original in the Austrian National Library, alongside other important works of European and human culture, science and history. Among the other treasures contained in the library are Martin Luther’s first complete translation of the Christian bible, and several of the works of the Renaissance-era doctor and philosopher, Paracelsus.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Austrian National Library to digitize works from the library, bringing its rare and unique collection to a global audience through Google Books. The library was founded in the fourteenth century, and it was intended to become the universal human library, containing books in German, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, among other languages. It contains the first ever printed book in Slovene, the oldest known prints in Bulgarian and an extensive collection of Czech and Hungarian works.

Through this agreement, the library will select up to 400,000 public domain books from its collections. Google will then digitize these works, making them available to anyone in the world with access to the web. This is a great step in our aim to help make the world’s books accessible to anyone with a connection to the Internet. We’re not alone in this aim. Around Europe and the rest of the world, an increasing number of organizations are running ambitious and promising book digitization projects, including the European Union’s own Europeana. We're very supportive of these efforts, because we want to see these books have the broadest reach possible. The books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana and in other digital libraries.

Through a proliferation of projects such as these, and through more partnerships between private and public bodies, important works like those owned by the Austrian National Library can have tremendous reach. Earlier this year we announced a partnership with the Italian Ministry of Culture to digitize books. Today’s announcement is the next step towards the goal of preserving and disseminating Europe’s cultural heritage.

The Austrian National Library is our tenth library partner in Europe, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. By working with these important institutions, we can help to unlock and democratize access to the world's cultural heritage.

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog) Read the full post 0 comments

Surfacing treasures of the deep with the University of California

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 4:44 PM

Posted by Ramsey Allington, Google Books Manager

One of the early pioneers in the library project, the University of California became a Google Books partner in 2006. Since then, over two million books have been made available online from the UC's vast collection, which is comprised of 100 research libraries housed across the ten UC campuses. Because of the hard work of UC staffers, interested scholars no longer need to travel to San Diego, Santa Cruz, or Los Angeles to work with unique or hard-to-find texts held at these campuses. An Internet connection is sufficient to access portions of what is collectively the largest research/academic library in the world.

One example of such a special collection is UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), the world’s largest oceanography library, where digitization was recently completed. Peter Brueggeman, the director of The Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, has this to say about Google’s work with UCSD to digitize these materials:

"The Scripps Oceanography Library has been in existence for more than 100 years, so digitizing and providing access to this extensive book and journal collection helps to create a larger and more complete digital library of materials on the marine environment for searching and use, including older works dating back to the 18th century in full-text. While these books and other materials have long been available on our library shelves for individual use, Google Books’ in-depth cross-collection searching feature is definitely a game-changer for scholarly research. Google’s digitization of our journal backruns makes these older scholarly resources searchable for scholars and other researchers."

Here are just a few examples of the notable books that we’ve digitized from the SIO collection:

• The Fishes of the Swedish South Polar Expedition, by Einar Lonnberg, 1905
  This report documents the fishes collected on a famous Antarctic expedition, the Swedish South-Polar Expedition of 1901-1903 led by Otto Nordenskjold. Although the expedition was a great scientific success and resulted in the collection of many species new to science, the explorers' ship was crushed by ice. The crew were forced to build and live in a stone hut on an Antarctic island, subsisting on birds eggs and penguins until they were rescued by a ship from Argentina.


• The Land and Sea Mammals of Middle America and the West Indies, by Daniel Giraud Elliot. 1904
  This book has a comprehensive collection of illustrations along with a long list of common names for each species. Did you know that in 1904 there were over 65 different common names for types of squirrels?


• The Stalk-eyed Crustacea, by Walter Faxon, 1895
  This book includes a report on crustaceans compiled during a United States expedition to Central and South America and the Galapagos aboard the famous ship the Albatross. The Albatross, a ship built by the U.S. government specifically for marine research, was a precursor to today’s U.S. oceanographic fleet of ships.

The SIO collection, like the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas adds to the overall richness of the corpus of material available on Google Books. We hope that you enjoy exploring these great volumes as much as we have. Read the full post 0 comments

Sharing Latin American works from the University of Texas

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 12:34 PM

Posted by Ramsey Allington & Jodi Healy Pritchett, Partner Managers

Since we launched our partnership with the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, we have been working hard to make their unique Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection accessible to readers online. The collection is one of the largest Latin American collections in the world, and is renowned for the scope and breadth of its materials covering Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean island nations, South America, and the Latino presence in the United States.

Today, we are proud to announce the completion of our digitization project with the University of Texas Libraries and the inclusion of over 500,000 unique volumes into the Google Books index.

Books from this collection range from the 18th century to newly-published materials, and represent over 50 languages. While the highest concentration of these texts are in Spanish and Portuguese, there are also books written in many indigenous languages of Central and South America. Whether you're interested in the political journal mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges's Funes el memorioso (Funes the Memorious), a memoir from an American veteran of the Mexican-American war, or even details on the archaeological remains from Lake Chapala, Mexico, you and other readers around the world now have access to a wealth of information from this exceptional collection.

"We’ve long wanted to share these treasures of Latin America with the world, and Google has helped us to do just that." -- Dennis Dillon, University of Texas

We invite you to explore this collection along with millions of other books on books.google.com. Read the full post 0 comments

University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Texas expand Google Books agreements

Thursday, July 09, 2009 at 10:27 AM

Posted by Tamar Fruchtman, Senior Corporate Counsel

In May, the University of Michigan announced an expanded agreement with Google that will take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States.

Today, two more longstanding library partners--the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas--have also expanded their partnerships with Google. That means that if the agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from these two libraries as well. This includes gems from Wisconsin's Native American collection and from UT-Austin's Benson Latin American collection.

Google was founded on the principle of making information more accessible to more people, so we're excited that UW-Madison and UT have joined in our efforts to bring these books to more people around the country. You can read more at the UW-Madison and UT-Austin websites. Read the full post 0 comments

The Bodleian's treasures, available to all

Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 10:44 AM

Posted by Ben Bunnell, Book Search Library Partnerships

In 2004, Google began a partnership with Oxford University Library to scan mostly 19th century public domain books from its Bodleian library. Five years on, we're delighted to announce the end of this phase of our scanning with Oxford, our first European partner. Together, we have digitized and made available on Google Book Search many hundreds of thousands of public domain books from the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries, representing the bulk of their available public domain content.

From English to German, to Spanish and French, most of the digitized works date from the 19th century and range from classic literature to more scientific volumes in fields including Geography, Philosophy or Anthropology. Among some of the works now available through Book Search, you can find the first English translation of Newton's Mathematical principles of natural philosophy from 1729, the first edition of Jane Austen's Emma, and John Cassell's Illustrated History of England. You can search and read the full text of these works on Google Book Search, and download and print a pdf if you wish to.

So, does this mean we are done?

Far from it! With most of Oxford's 19th century public domain works now digitized and available to users online, we look forward to continuing our partnership with Oxford to digitize more content as it becomes available and work together to bring more books to more people in more languages around the world.

"Library users have always loved browsing books for the serendipitous discoveries they provide. Digital books offer a similar thrill, but on multiple levels-- deep entry into the texts or the ability to browse the virtual shelf of books assembled from the world's great libraries," says Sarah E. Thomas, Bodley's Librarian and Director of Oxford University Library Services.

For more information on Book Search, visit books.google.com.

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Welcome, Bienvenue, Willkommen Europeana: the EU Launches Its Digital Library

Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 10:30 AM

Posted by Santiago de la Mora, European Partnerships Lead, Book Search

Today, we learned of some good news for the promotion of culture and reading: the European Commission launched an important online project called Europeana. This European Commission effort creates a common access point to Europe's digitized resources. Over time, it plans to grow to include six million items, including film, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archives. The collection will include everything from the Spanish National Library's Beatus commentaries from the 10th century to the Greek National Library's original publications of Homer's epics and hymns to the Danish Library's portrait collection dating from the 17th century.

Digitization projects like Europeana send a strong signal that authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies can work together to democratize access to the world's collective knowledge. The more of these projects, the easier it will be for readers and researchers around the world to be able to search books and other materials that now are scattered throughout the globe and and difficult to access.

As we move ahead with Google Book Search, we look forward to finding new ways to collaborate on initiatives such as Europeana -- and taking part in what could become the biggest technological leap in disseminating knowledge since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Read the full post 0 comments

A first for France: the City of Lyon and Google partner up to digitize books

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:19 AM

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnership Development Manager, Google Book Search, France

As a native of Lyon, France, I often visited the Municipal Library of Lyon during my student days. I was always impressed by the building itself, and of course by the books that the library tower housed. I never imagined what technology could make it possible for anyone to access those books like I could.

That's why I'm so excited to announce that Lyon, France's 2nd largest city, has made this renowned library the first French library to join the Google Book Search Library Project--the result of a shared vision between Google, Head Librarian Patrick Bazin, and the Mayor of Lyon, Gérard Collomb. Thanks to this relationship, Lyon and Google will digitize close to 500,000 public domain books and make them available free of charge.

As Google Book Search's representative in the French-speaking world, it is particularly satisfying to see a revered local institution such as the Municipal Library of Lyon build a relationship that will last for many years to the benefit of students, researchers and readers around the world.

Since the Renaissance, the city of Lyon has been a center for making and selling books across Europe. The Lyon region was even a cradle for the early success of Diderot’s 18th century Encyclopedia, an unmatched effort to compile all human knowledge at the time. This rich past is reflected in the library's collections, which include rare works by 16th century writers Maurice Scève and Nostradamus, scientific treaties such as the first edition of the Principia of Newton as well as the Des Fontaines Jesuit collection, a unique series of works reflecting the ideas and intellectual heritage of the Jesuit Order around the world.

On behalf on the Book Search team, we welcome the Municipal Library of Lyon to the Book Search project. Read the full post 0 comments

Columbia University joins the Google Book Search Library Project

Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 11:48 AM

Posted by Gabriel Stricker, Global Communications and Public Affairs (Columbia University, SIPA '01)

Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), I spent more hours than I care to remember in many of the university's two-dozen libraries, where I checked out books on subjects ranging from finance and accounting to globalization and privatization. Over my years at SIPA, I must've carried close to a ton of books between West 118th Street and my home off of Morningside Park. My time at Columbia was one part mind-expanding and one part back-breaking.

Now, years later, I work here at Google on a variety of exciting projects, including Google Book Search. Today, I'm pleased to announce that Columbia University has become the 28th library to join with Google Book Search to digitize works from its collections, and make them searchable and discoverable online. These public-domain works will be available to view and download for anyone with an internet connection.

This is great news for readers everywhere, who will now be able to view Columbia's amazing collections of books on architecture, political science, international studies, Asian languages and more. In practice, this means that a high-school student in Mendocino, California or Mendoza, Argentina will now have access to the same materials as the Columbia student in Morningside Heights. It also makes pulling these gems off the shelf a considerably lighter load to carry. Read the full post 0 comments

University of Virginia opens exhibit on Google Book Search

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 12:09 PM

Posted by Esther Onega, On-Site Google Book Project (GBP) Manager, University of Virginia

Since the University of Virginia Library became a partner in Google Book Search, we've gotten lots of questions from staff and community members about the project. This is, of course, an interest the Library encourages. So the GBP team decided to create an exhibit to explain how Book Search works, as well as how it fits in with the Library's history of implementing digital projects, a priority for us since 1992. The exhibit, running now, is located near the main entrance of Alderman Library, the main library at the University of Virginia.

Fellow GBP team member Holly Robertson and I just happened to be putting the finishing touches on the exhibit when someone came along and took our picture:



The exhibit is located next to the information desk, so we felt it was important to show not only how Book Search works, but also what people can find when they use it. Take a look:



We're delighted that this project is helping to make the Library's resources discoverable by people everywhere, and we hope this display will generate even more interest, enthusiasm, and understanding of Google Book Search. Read the full post 0 comments

Share and enjoy

Thursday, September 06, 2007 at 6:08 AM

Posted by Manas Tungare, Intern

"Share and Enjoy": It's not just the slogan of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in my favorite 5-book trilogy by Douglas Adams; it's also a good way to describe a new feature in Google Book Search.

When Google began scanning books from various libraries and academic institutions, it did so with the goal of preserving and making available online the enormous archive of knowledge humanity has built. Books are great and we'll never be able to improve on some aspects. But Google Book Search brought Google's forte, searching, to books. In addition, the Web lets us do much more in terms of linking, sharing, and aggregating all types of information, so we decided to combine these two advances to allow you to do other things you can't easily do with physical books. While it is easy to share links, photos, videos, and opinions on the Web, sharing books with your friends online used to be tough -- and tougher even, to share individual clippings from a book. This summer, I worked with the Book Search team to add clip-sharing features to Google Book Search.

You can now highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world. You can post your favorite clips to your blog along with a personal annotation, collect them in a Google Notebook, or share them with friends anywhere you decide to embed the link. Your clip looks exactly as it appears in the book, or if you prefer plain text, we have that too.

So if you're writing a blog post or in a Notebook about the Renaissance, you can now quote straight from books on the topic: like this one, about Leonardo da Vinci:



Get started by clicking on the clip icon (). Share and enjoy! Read the full post 0 comments

Cornell University becomes newest partner in Library Project

Wednesday, August 08, 2007 at 10:32 AM

Posted by William Rucklidge, Software Engineer

I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study. --Ezra Cornell, 1865

As a graduate student at Cornell University, I spent many hours in the library stacks. Cornell's collections are outstanding in breadth and depth; there, it seemed to me, any student could indeed "find instruction in any study." So I'm especially excited to share the news that Cornell has joined our Library Project as part of its educational mission. The collection housed at the extraordinary Mann Library will be digitized, making it possible for people everywhere to search and discover books on environmental science, public policy, natural resources, and much more.

"In its quest to be the world's land-grant university, Cornell strives to serve the scholarly and research needs of those beyond the campus," said Cornell President David J. Skorton. "This project advances Cornell's ability to provide global access to our library resources and to build human capacity across the globe."

This is tremendous news, and I hope people around the world will gain as much joy and enrichment from Cornell's libraries as I did. Read the full post 0 comments

Keio University Joins Google's Library Project

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 7:04 PM

Posted by Laura DeBonis, Director, Book Search Library Partnerships

Last week, Keio University became the latest partner to join Google Books Library Project, and our first library partner in Japan. The combined collections of the Keio University libraries total more than two million printed works. Working together, Google and the Keio University Library will digitize at least 120,000 public domain books from these collections, so that readers around the world can view, browse, read, and even download public domain materials by simply searching online at books.google.co.jp. (You can also search these books by typing your search term in Japanese on books.google.com.)

"The Google project allows us to make our collections visible worldwide, allowing us to contribute to research and education on a global scale. Our university was founded in 1858 by Yukichi Fukuzawa, who was well known for his commitment to bringing information and media forward into the modern age. This makes Keio ideally suited to be the first Japanese library to participate in Google Book Search," says Professor S. Sugiyama, Director, Keio University Library.

We are glad to announce our first library partner in Japan with the Keio University Library. This is the 26th library to join the Google Books Library Project, which digitizes books from major libraries around the world and makes their collections searchable on Google Book Search. Read the full post 0 comments

A consortium joins the Library Project

Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 12:13 PM

Posted by Ben Bunnell, Library Partnership Team

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. Read the full post 0 comments

Ghent University joins Google Book Search

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 at 11:43 AM

Posted by Emmanuel Begerem, Consumer Support Associate
Photo by Francis Vandendriessche, Ghent University


As an alumnus of Ghent University, I am thrilled that the university has decided to open its historic and special collections to the world. Ghent University has always striven for innovation and it hit a new milestone today by becoming the first Dutch-language library to join the Library Project. This joint project will allow researchers, students and users from all around the world to search, browse and read the incredible collection of public domain books the university has to offer.

I have been working in Ireland for 3 years now and whenever I head back to Belgium I don't miss a chance to pay a nostalgic visit to the university. In the coming months, the library, including its 64 meter high book tower, will close for a massive renovation. Thanks to the library's agreement with Book Search, the public will soon have another way to access these great books-- by finding them online. Read the full post 0 comments

University of Lausanne and Google make thousands of French books available online

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 12:37 PM

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Book Search

Today the Library of the University of Lausanne announced it is the latest partner to join the Google Book Search Library Project. This is great news for the preservation of Swiss cultural heritage and for Francophones like myself, who are thrilled about the addition of even more public domain French books to the index.

When I first visited the library, Hubert Villard, Director of the Library, recommended I check out Le Livre à Lausanne, cinq siècles d'édition et d'imprimerie. In reading it, I discovered Lausanne and the Canton de Vaud region have an established tradition for innovation in the publishing and printing industries that dates back to the 15th century.

During the last century, the University of Lausanne has been one of the pioneers in library automation in Switzerland as well as the rest of Europe. In fact, the idea of opening up the library's collections to the world (thousands of books in the public domain) has been entertained for many years by the director and his staff. Today, in 2007, through a shared vision with the government of the Canton de Vaud (who supports this major cultural initiative) and a broad partnership with Google, this dream becomes a reality.

I was born in Lyons in France, not that far from the Swiss border. It has been wonderful for me to see our French-speaking neighbors embrace the idea of universal online access for their collections. And soon I won't have to cross the border to be able to browse the University of Lausanne's shelves, which include an original of Diderot's 18th century Encyclopédie. Read the full post 0 comments

The Bavarian State Library becomes largest non-English library partner

Tuesday, March 06, 2007 at 7:52 AM

Posted by Jens Redmer, Head of Google Book Search Europe, Middle East, and Africa

I love books. We Germans love books. And we read them enthusiastically. Germans are not only known to be among the most intense sauerkraut (legend) and beer (fact) consumers worldwide, but even more so among the most avid book consumers — and book creators.

My fellow German national Johannes Gensfleisch, much better known as Gutenberg, created a machine that changed the way mankind gained access to information forever. We all know the incredibly positive impact his press had on the development and dissemination of culture. In our era, digitisation can substantially improve access to information in a similar fashion. Today, everyone with internet access — regardless of age or location — can discover information on their specific subject of interest, in almost any language, with only a few strokes on a keyboard. I find that absolutely fantastic.

Europe is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions of the world. This multilinguality fascinates and drives us at Google — reason enough for us to adapt and operate our products in far more than 100 languages. Did you know you can even search on Google in Romantsch, a language little known outside of Switzerland?

That is why today, I am truly excited and pleased to announce a significant step towards enriching our multilingual index: we are adding our largest non-English library to the Google Books Library Project, thanks to a new partnership with the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library). Book lovers around the world will soon be able to access the library's public domain works online through Google Book Search, tracing the rich history of German literature through the centuries.

As one of Europe's most important and renowned international research libraries, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek will add more than a million out-of-copyright books to the program, from well-loved German classics by the Brothers Grimm and Goethe to extensive collections previously only available to those able to consult the library's stacks. In addition to German-language works, the library's collection includes numerous out-of-copyright works in French, Spanish, Latin, Italian and English. Some of the works of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek date back to the very first moments of book printing and bear incredible cultural meaning.

I grew up in the very north of Germany, and I used to fall asleep as a child hearing my parents reading a tale from the Brothers Grimm, such as Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) or Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), so I know and adore these true classics only too well, much like every child in Germany, and it is very exiting to know that early editions will now come online.

I am not only thrilled about this partnership as a German, but even more so as a European. Helping to make the diverse European culture discoverable and accessible to a worldwide audience is one of the most fascinating jobs one can ever imagine. Servus und herzlich willkommen, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Read the full post 0 comments

The next best thing to being there

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 11:03 AM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager

In the spring of 1907 Kenneth Grahame sent his seven-year old son, Alastair (nicknamed 'Mouse'), the first of a series of letters telling the story of a group of animals and their various adventures along the river, in the woods and on the road. These letters, centering on the swaggering Mr. Toad, formed the first whisperings of what would become one of the best-loved children's stories of all time: The Wind in the Willows. (http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/news/2007_feb_23)

Tomorrow, to celebrate World Book Day, Oxford University's Bodleian Library will display these original letters as well as manuscripts and special illustrated editions of this children's classic.

If you happen to be near the Oxford area, you'll be able to view these precious artifacts in person. And while young children from local schools listen to readings from the book in a specially decorated corner of the library's Divinity School, people around the world can explore Grahame's classic tale online through Google Book Search (we have the original 1908 edition digitized as well as multiple in-print versions). You can even take a virtual tour of the Bodleian's exhibit, as the library has made images of the original letters and manuscripts available online. Near or far from Oxford, you'll be able to enjoy The Wind in the Willows and explore the rich history of a story that has delighted readers for a hundred years. Read the full post 0 comments