University of Wisconsin joins Google Book Search program

The latest entry into the long list of libraries participating in the Google Book Search program is the University of Wisconsin.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison would now work with the search engine giant to provide access to hundreds of thousands of public and historical materials from the UW-Madison libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library.

The content would be selected from a combined 7.2 million library holdings. Edward Van Gemert, interim director of the library system said in a statement on this announcement: “Whenever possible, the university intends to make the complete content of public documents available on the Internet, including text, images, and maps.”

The Google Books Library Project originally began with five participating libraries — the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.