The library of the Complutense University of Madrid became the first Spanish-language collection added to the Google Books project, according to the Mountain View, California, company.
Internet juggernaut Google has announced that its virtual collection of out-of-copyright books available online would grow with the inclusion of Complutense University in Madrid to make hundreds of thousands of literary works kept in Spain’s largest university library available online.
The Complutense University of Madrid library, the country’s second largest behind the National Library, houses 3 million works, including by Cervantes, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and thousands of other Spanish-language titles in the public domain.
It also contains volumes in French, German, Latin, Italian and English.
“Out-of-copyright books previously only available to people with access to Madrid’s Complutense University Library, or the money to travel, will now be accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, wherever they live,” university chancellor Carlos Berzosa said in a release.
“We are quite literally opening our library to the world. The opportunities for education are phenomenal and we are delighted to be working with Google on this project.”
Complutense University is the first Spanish partner to join Google’s Library Project.
Google and the Madrid university would work together to digitalize the university’s hundreds of thousands of public domain works and make the full texts available online, they said in a joint statement.
As well as its collection of Spanish-language public domain books, the university will also make available works of Spanish historic importance, as well numerous books in French, German, Latin, Italian and English.
The library’s collection boasts early editions of Spanish and Latin American authors including Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and Garcilaso de la Vega.
Google, the world’s most used search engine, wants to scan every book in print to make extracts accessible for online searches on the Internet, prompting a clash with authors and publishers concerned about copyright.
“We already have other non-English-language books, but this will be a huge boost to our Spanish-language content, as well as other languages,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement.
More than 400 million people speak Spanish worldwide and this literature holds important cultural significance, so we are enormously excited about working with the Complutense University, said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google.
The Complutense University of Madrid was the second European library to join the Google Book project, which includes Harvard, Stanford; the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the New York Public Library, the Universities of Michigan and California for the project. The U.S. Library of Congress is involved in a similar effort with Google.
“It is a unique opportunity to democratize our library’s store of knowledge,” said Jose Antonio Magal, the director of Complutense’s library.
“For years, libraries have jealously guarded a major part of human knowledge … now we are going to open our doors, we are going to unload our shelves and we are not only going to open up our books but we are going to make them available on computer,” he told Spanish radio.
Joyce and Dickens
The Internet giant is funding the scanning of titles as part of a nearly two-year-old effort to make the library collections searchable online.
Authors and publishers’ groups in the United States, France and Germany have sued Google over the program as it relates to books still under copyright, claiming that by digitizing them, it might tempt consumers to stop buying printed works.
Google argues that it is simply creating an electronic index and that it will publish full texts of only books whose copyrights have expired.
Google made classic literary works available for free download in printable .pdf format last month as part of its controversial quest to make the world’s books available online.
It recently began allowing users to download and print public domain books for free, including works by Charles Dickens and James Joyce. Also, works such as Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” and Victor Hugo’s “Marion de Lorme” can be printed out at the Google Book Search website http://books.google.com, click on radio button that says “Full View Books.”
For works still protected, Google publishes only a few sentences based on a user’s search query.
Publishers maintain that scanning the books in the first place is a violation of copyright law. Many of them have launched their own digital-scanning projects in a bid to lure consumers to their own Web sites.
Following the legal threats, some of Google’s library partners said they would allow scanning of only public-domain works and delay anything still protected by copyright until the issue was resolved by the courts.
Google Book Search already works with the New York Public Library and the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and California.
Only the University of Michigan said it would proceed with scanning all works.