Inside Google Books: One million books scanned and returned to CIC university libraries

"oday we're celebrating an important milestone: Google has digitized one million books from member libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is the consortium of the Big Ten member universities and the University of Chicago. Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. Once digitized, the books are shipped back to our originating libraries to resume their journeys from bookshelves to backpacks. While Google preserves library books in digital form, and makes them more accessible to more people as a result, it also sends participating libraries (at no cost to us) digital copies for our own archives or other non-commercial use. Accordingly, the CIC libraries are making hundreds of thousands of the recently digitized public domain volumes accessible through their partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library...."