Google Books to begin digitalization of IU folklore collection

Older and forgotten books in IU’s extensive library collection often fall by the wayside in researchers’ attempts to get the most out of what the libraries have to offer.
By digitizing the books through the Google Books Project, every book will be available online for researchers’ use.

As part of the Google Books Project agreement in 2007, each Big Ten university agreed to join Google in this effort, Eric Bartheld, director of communications for IU Bloomington Libraries, said.

IU’s folklore collection will be the first “collection of distinction” digitized through an agreement between the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and Google, Bartheld said. Digitizing the folklore collection will begin in mid-May and will hopefully be completed by the end of the summer.

“The basic approach is to grab books from anywhere and put them in one big pot with results from here, there and everywhere,” said Moira Smith, librarian for anthropology, folklore, sociology and social work at the IU Libraries.

The project will allow anyone to search volumes on Google using keywords, Bartheld said. Most volumes will only allow researchers to view small portions of the works, due to concerns about copyright issues, he said.

“The snippets will give readers a preview of the volume,” Smith said. “Readers will get enough information to decide ‘Yes, this is a book I want to look at.’”

Libraries participating in the agreement are interested in making the content of their collections as widely available as possible, said Kim Armstrong, assistant director of the CIC.

“Google makes digitizing possible in a way that the libraries could not have achieved on the same timeline,” she said.

Of the Big Ten universities, IU was the first to begin digitizing, said Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly dean of University Libraries. Because the libraries’ collections were already catalogued and readily accessible, they were ready to send the volumes to Google, she said.

“We send books to Google by semi-truck loads,” Smith said. “Digitizing the books takes about six to 12 weeks.”

As part of the agreement, each institution involved will digitize at least one “collection of distinction,” Armstrong said. Other collections will be brought together across the CIC institutions. The “collections of distinction” are important because they bring intellectual content together the way they would have done in a print environment, she said.

“We have the largest single library folklore collection in the world,” Smith said. “The ‘collection of distinction’ shows off the exceptional resource that IU has.”

As of now the collection will be put into Google Book Search as single volumes, but Smith said people will hopefully be able to search the collection in its entirety in the future.

Collections in print are deteriorating, Armstrong said, and digitizing the volumes will provide long-term access.

“I think some people believe we are devaluing the book by digitizing them,” Steele said. “But by digitizing them we are providing a new discovery mechanism that the book never had before. For many people, if something isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.”