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Society Joins Google Book Digitization Project
The Wisconsin Historical Society, in its role as a University of Wisconsin-Madison campus library, has joined the university and Google in an agreement to expand online access to hundreds of thousands of its books and documents. The Society joins libraries at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and elsewhere that are currently working with Google to digitize portions of their collections. In coming months, truckloads of volumes currently available only on the Society's shelves in Madison will begin to become available free on the Web through Google's Book Search service.
"The UW-Madison and Google collaboration is a perfect fit with the Wisconsin Historical Society's vision for public education and outreach," says Society director Ellsworth Brown. "We look forward to working with them to expand access to our history and heritage resources."
The partnership permits the university and the Society to select the materials that will be sent to Google for digitizing, and discussions to date have centered on the Society's collections of federal and state government documents as the top priority.
The Society has collected the publications of state and federal agencies for a century and a half, and its holdings include government documents dating back well beyond that, into the Colonial era. Since the late 19th century, the Society and the university have cooperated to make sure that at least one copy of every significant publication of the U.S. government came to Wisconsin for free public use by state residents. The agreement will make this wealth of information — created, collected, and preserved over 150 years with state support — freely available to all citizens.
Library-Archives Director Peter Gottlieb explained that, "Our remarkably strong holdings in documents issued by both the U.S. government and Wisconsin state agencies, added to UW's own federal government publications, was one of the factors that made us attractive to Google as a collections source." All parties expect the project to begin with hundreds of thousands of historical government documents, but agree that it could eventually include other types of materials such as the Society's enormous collections of rare pamphlets, which are not likely to be found in other participating institutions.
With more than 7 million items on their shelves, the combined library collections of UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society comprise one of the largest collections of documents and historical materials to be found in the United States. "Wisconsin is in a position to take a leading role in making the primary documents of U.S. government history freely accessible on the Internet for anyone to find and use," says UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell. Adds Edward Van Gemert, interim director of the UW-Madison General Library System, "Whenever possible, the university intends to make the complete content of public documents available on the Internet, including text, images and maps." The books and documents will not be harmed by the digitization process, and fragile originals can be retired from handling once a digital surrogate is available.
"This project reflects the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, the notion that the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state and beyond — by making some of our most valuable resources readily available to the public," Van Gemert says. Superintendent of Schools and UW Regent Elizabeth Burmaster says the project has great promise for the classroom. "UW-Madison's digitizing program has given special attention to state and regional collections related to history, the environment and the arts," Burmaster says. "I'm encouraged by the emphasis on expanding access to collections that are useful to Wisconsin educators and students — it makes our best libraries a resource for K-16 education."
In addition to public documents, the UW-Madison digitizing program will target other high-use collections, such as history of medicine, patents and discoveries, history of engineering, early publications of scientific societies, American and Wisconsin history, genealogical materials, Wisconsin state documents, decorative arts, visual/material culture, maps and sheet music.
:: Posted October 18, 2006
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