The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press has partnered with the Google Books Library Project, a global initiative comprising leading research libraries working to make books and printed materials searchable and accessible to readers and researchers worldwide.

Through this collaborative partnership, more than 100,000 unique volumes from the UD Library’s collections will be digitized over the next three years. The project focuses on works that are rare, out of print, or otherwise unavailable online, transforming historically significant in-person accessible works into shared global resources.

“Google Books was launched over 20 years ago with the ambition to make the world’s book-bound knowledge digitally searchable,” said Steve McVay, lead of the Google Books Library Project. “We are thrilled to welcome UD to this initiative and to integrate its distinctive, scholarly titles into this global digital library.”

Library staff began sending physical books to Google’s U.S. digitization center in secure, ongoing batches for scanning this summer. The Library, Museums and Press will retain physical or digital ownership of all scanned materials.

All processed materials will be made freely searchable via Google Books, discoverable through the University of Delaware Library catalog, and preserved in the HathiTrust Digital Library, a nonprofit collaborative of academic and research libraries holding more than 19 million digitized items.

For questions about the Google Books initiative at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, email Erin Daix.

For further information, please email: daix@udel.edu