Ohio University Libraries to join Google Books Library Project

This summer, Ohio University Libraries will partner with Google to improve access to its collection by creating digitized versions of hundreds of thousands of books that are out of print, rare, or otherwise inaccessible online.

Ohio University Libraries is participating in an effort to create what Google calls “a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages.”  The Google Books Library Project, which has significantly contributed to the digital corpus of 40 million books in over 500 languages, identified several hundred thousand books held by Ohio University Libraries that are not yet in their collection. 

The Library Project combines the Ohio University Libraries’ ability to curate relevant scholarly collections with Google’s ability to expand digital access, better serving researchers everywhere. In addition to Google Books, these newly digitized books will be made available via the HathiTrust Digital Library, a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries that has preserved more than 19 million digitized items.  Digital copies will also be preserved by the Ohio University Libraries.

“In their curatorial and preservation roles, academic libraries have built impressive collections of scholarly content that are place-bound,” said Rob Ross, dean of University Libraries. “This partnership with Google improves access to these materials by performing the laborious, page-by-page scanning and optical character recognition process to create searchable, online texts and integrating these texts into an already huge digital corpus. For researchers, the result is a more comprehensive collective collection.”

From July 2026 to June 2029, the Libraries will send physical books to Google’s U.S. digitization center to be scanned before being returned to the Libraries for reshelving.  This process maintains the Libraries’ ownership of the physical books, while providing high-quality digitized copies of out-of-copyright books to readers in perpetuity. 

“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 pleased that Ohio University supports this great ambition,” 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. 

For questions regarding the Google Books program at Ohio University Libraries, please contact Paige Musselman, executive assistant, at musselmanp@ohio.edu.