Because students frequently start their research on Google instead of campus libraries, university librarians are taking the unique step of putting copies of their library books online, courtesy of the Google Book Search Library Project.
For instance, Google this spring began scanning 500,000 of the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s 7.9 million library holdings, including collections on American and Wisconsin history, medicine, engineering and genealogical materials. Once the materials are scanned, people can read the universityâ??s public domain books online for free. For copyrighted books, Google will show a few lines of text and provide links to find the material in libraries or for purchase in online stores.