14 DAY TRIAL // The Mountain View company managed to lure 10 more partners for the Book Search technology in a move meant to bring more digitized content for the product. The Committee on Institutional Collaboration brings 10 big schools and the University of Chicago to the Google content providers, raising the total number of agreements to 16. According to Ben Bunnell, Library Partnership Team, the Mountain View company might receive up to 78.000.000 volumes hosted in their libraries. The main goal? Just like other agreements, Google wants to digitize the content and make it available on the Internet.
"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," the Google employee said.
In the recent period, Google partnered with a lot of libraries and universities, most of the partnerships being meant to bring more content to the search engine. However, the criticism appeared quickly as some publishers decided to sue the parent company Google for trying to digitize their content without authorization. A interesting case was reported today when the Google Book Search stand was involved in a funny situation when one of the publishers involved in the critics stole 2 laptops belonging to Google. The main idea was to show the feeling of stealing unauthorized information to the Mountain View company. Obvious, he returned the laptops after the owners were alerted by the missing and started to ask around the stand if anybody so the thief.