Director's Statement

This partnership between our 12 member universities and Google is unprecedented. What makes this work so exciting is that we will literally open the pages of millions of books that have been assembled on our library shelves over more than a century. In seconds, we’ll be able to browse across the content of thousands of volumes, searching for words or phrases, and making links across those texts that would have taken weeks or months or years of dedicated and scrupulous analysis. It is an extraordinary effort, blending the aspirations of librarians, university administrators, and scholars from across 12 world-class research universities. And our corporate partner possesses unparalleled expertise in creating and opening the digital world to coherent and comprehensive searching.

The initiative is not entirely without controversy – no great undertaking ever is. But our universities believe strongly in the power of information to change the world, and in preserving, protecting and extending access to information. We have carefully weighed and considered the intellectual property issues and believe that our effort is firmly within the guidelines of current copyright law, while providing some flexibility as those laws are tested in the new digital environment in the coming years.

Here in the CIC, we don’t just talk about collaboration. It’s part of the way our universities do business together. And this project is just one more example of the ways our universities work effectively to share expertise, leverage campus resources and collaborate on innovative programs.

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Barbara McFadden Allen, Director
Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)