Early in her presidency, Mary Sue Coleman met with Larry Page, co-founder of the search engine giant Google and a 1999 computer engineering graduate.
“He made some comment about digitizing all the literature in the entire world, and I thought, ‘Oh, a 29-year-old and his ambitions,’” she said. “I didn’t think it was even possible.”
Coleman was even more doubtful when Provost Paul Courant, the university’s chief academic officer, and University Librarian William Gosling came to her office in 2004 to say the library was entering a partnership with Google to digitize Michigan’s 7 million books.
The library already had a strong track record of digitizing materials, with technicians scanning upwards of 7,000 books a year. But now Page was proposing to digitize books by the millions.
At the rate U-M was scanning books, it could take up to a thousand years to copy the entire collection. Then “Larry waltzed in here and said, ‘I think I can do it in six years,’” Courant said.
Page and the University Library did just that, and U-M became the first public university to participate in Google’s massive book digitization initiative.
Google workers methodically removed books from shelves and trucked them to off-campus scanning stations, where employees worked around the clock. Soon they were scanning up to 30,000 books a week.
Campus leaders believed the project was central to U-M’s mission to create and share knowledge. Authors were not as enthusiastic. The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google, citing copyright infringement. It took years to resolve the dispute. The ultimate settlements permitted something less than universal access to every word of every book. But the result is still an enormous boon to learning around the world, with books searchable on Google Books or Hathi Trust. For books in the public domain, with no copyright restrictions, a user can see the entire book.
The Google project has led to the scanning of some 4.7 million books, or roughly 1.4 billion pages, making the University Library the world’s first academic research library to see most of its collection digitized. Other early Google partners were Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, followed by dozens of other academic libraries.
