Google signed with UC

Google’s signed on a extremely important contributor that’s taking an liberal view of fair use: it is the entire University of California system. There can be number of factors noted, which make signing up UC a huge coup for Google. One factor is simply, expansion of system. Berkeley, the first UC campus, dates from 1868, and the system has since grown to contain 10 campuses, as well as several major research plans, such as those at San Francisco, Los Angeles (UCLA), Santa Cruz, and Davis.

Google’s library project was, in part, an effort to make certain that researchers in the sciences and other fields didn’t miss out on the vast store of information contained in the books of some major libraries, as well as the ones at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and the University of Michigan. The project aims to scan the contents of these libraries, digitize the text, and index the resulting information for typical Google-style searching. As with other Google book projects, the work has run into the clash between copyright concerns and fair use. In response to these problems, some of the institutions involved have limited the digitizing to works known to be in the public domain.

The quality of the collection is also predictable to be very important. Collectively, the UC schools considered the top public university systems in the US, and include some of the top research programs in the world. As such, the 34 million books in its collection would be a extremely significant addition. But UC is in fact following Michigan’s lead in allowing the scanning of their entire collection, rather than only those works that are definitely in the public domain. Hopefully, the combination of the UC collection and Google’s indexing skills would mean more researchers would have to rely less on luck to find older information.

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