Libraries Collaborate on Mass Book Digitization Pilot Project

UC Davis, along with four other Google Books partner libraries, has been leading and participating in a two-year pilot project to bring more intentionality to mass digitization projects.

During 2023-2025, UC Davis, Cornell University, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, and Rutgers University coordinated to contribute scholarly content in two topic areas to the Google Books project. This content is then contributed to the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The two topics, bees & insect pollinators and Puerto Rico, met a number of criteria for testing the effectiveness of being more intentional:

• Books and serials on these topics published before 1964 (i.e., during the U.S. copyright “renewal period”) remain highly relevant to contemporary research and scholarship.
• These topics would likely include publications that are likely to be government documents that are (or could be) in the public domain.
• These materials are likely to be held in the “main” library on a campus which should help to streamline operational processes for contribution.
• The topics are broad enough that any research library is likely to have some materials to contribute for the pilot.
• Together, the prompts encompass a broad array of disciplines across the academy.

The pilot demonstrated the library community’s capacity for strategic selection. The final report of the pilot participants is now available on UC’s eScholarship.