News & Events

First Step in A New Frontier


The electronic catalog that describes the millions of books contained within the IUB Libraries now links to Google Book Search, making previews and tables of contents—and in some cases full text—available for selected items.

Records in IUCAT, the electronic catalog, link to books Google has digitized in an ongoing effort to create an online library. The amount of information available for each book depends on a number of factors: for example, if the book has been digitized (scanned and made available in electronic form); if the book is protected by copyright; or if the publisher makes the books available to Google.

For the digitized books, users can usually search inside the book's contents. Summaries, references from Web sites, links to reviews, widely quoted passages, tables of contents, and frequently, links to Google Maps of places mentioned in the book are part of the new service. An icon for Google Book Search appears at the right of the computer screen for catalog records that have links.


Most of the full text displayed is limited to books published before 1923, when U.S. copyright protection expires.

"This is the first step in a long continuum to improve access to digitized works," says Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries. "Plans are under way to digitize hundreds of thousands of materials from IU's collections."

As an increasing number of books become available in digital form, the catalog will continue to open new pathways for research and discovery.

Google is working with academic research libraries to digitize books from their collections. Indiana University and the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) last year entered into a collective agreement with Google to digitize their distinctive books.

The consortium will create a first-of-its-kind "shared digital repository" to provide collective archiving and access to the full content of out-of-copyright works. Google will digitize an estimated 4 to 7 million volumes of the CIC libraries.

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation is a consortium of 12 research universities, advancing their missions by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources and collaborating on innovative programs.