A new partnership between University of South Carolina Libraries and Google Books will expand access to thousands of volumes from the Libraries’ collections.

The Libraries are joining the Google Books Library Project, which seeks to create “a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages.” The Google Books Library Project, which to date comprises some 40 million books in over 500 languages, identified approximately a hundred thousand books held by University Libraries that are great candidates to add to their collection. In most cases, these volumes are not available elsewhere.

Google will digitize all of those volumes and, in addition to making them available through the searchable online Google Books site, will add them to the collections available through the HathiTrust Digital Library, a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries that has preserved more than 19 million digitized items.

That means the partnership with Google Books will significantly expand University Libraries’ capacity to contribute to HathiTrust’s mission to preserve and provide long-term digital access to the published record, says Associate Dean for Information Resources and Technologies Heather Heckman.

“Before this partnership, we contributed a handful of scanned volumes to HathiTrust each year,” Heckman notes. “It was labor-intensive work, and we remain very proud of what we've been able to accomplish. But with Google Books, we will increase our contributions to HathiTrust by orders of magnitude. It's very exciting to be able to give so much more to Hathi, and by extension to the many scholars who depend upon it for their work.”

“Google Books was launched over 20 years ago, with the ambition to make all books from around the world digitally available and searchable for everyone. We are thrilled that the University of South Carolina supports this great ambition, and gladly welcome the inclusion of their titles into the project,” said Steve McVay, the lead of the Google Books Library Project.

Google Books was launched in 2004, becoming one of the largest collections of human writing and knowledge. The digital copies of books are provided by authors and publishers in the Google Books Partner Program or by library partners through Google’s Library Project.