HOLLIS, Google Partner on Web

A few clicks in HOLLIS may now save you a trip to Widener Library, as tens of thousands of scanned books become electronically available through Harvard’s library catalog in the next few weeks.

Eventually, all of the University’s library books digitized as part of the Google Books Library Project will be made directly accessible through links in the online HOLLIS system.

For instance, a student looking for the 1850 book “Antitrinitarian Biography” by Robert Wallace, a three-volume tome on Unitarianism, can get to it simply by clicking the “Internet Link” in its HOLLIS record rather than hot-footing it over to the Andover Theological Library.

“The books will be available instantaneously, seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” said Dale P. Flecker, associate librarian for systems and planning in the University Library (HUL).

The Google Books Library Project scans books from many major libraries and makes them freely available online. Since 2004, Google has been scanning books from Harvard’s libraries that are no longer under copyright protection. According to Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53, who is director of the University Library, the eventual goal is to digitize all of Harvard’s out-of-copyright books, which will eventually encompass more than a million books.

Before Friday, when the links began appearing in HOLLIS, the digitized books were not directly available through the Harvard system. A user would have had to search for them separately on the Google Books Web site.

“Many books that were lost will be found,” Verba said.

A next step will link Google Books users to the Harvard catalog once they find a book from Harvard’s collections, according to Flecker.

“You’re going to be able to go back and forth from Google Book Search into Harvard, or from Harvard’s catalog into Google.” said Verba. “Both of these are important.”

It is important that Harvard researchers continue to use HOLLIS as a starting point for their research rather than the Google book search, according to Verba.

“You would never notice that the Harvard collection has materials that aren’t on Google,” Verba said.

Harvard’s library collections contain 15.5 million physical volumes, which still dwarfs the million or so books currently available online through Google Books.

But the digital copies being provided through HOLLIS, which Verba said would encompass all of the Harvard books scanned by Google since 2004, currently number only in the tens of thousands. The dearth of books, said Verba, was part of the reason why the HOLLIS integration was not implemented before.

“For a long time, there weren’t that many books out there,” said Verba. “We’re really now only expanding our scanning.”

After all the existing digitized books have been added to HOLLIS, new Harvard books added to the Google project will be integrated into Harvard’s catalog on a rolling basis.

Although Harvard’s collaboration with Google currently only involves out-of-copyright books that are not too fragile to scan, Verba has said he hopes the project will eventually include all the books in the Harvard collection.

The Google project has come under fire for its plans to scan copyrighted material at other institutions, although only snippets of those books are made available online. There are pending lawsuits against Google from publishers and authors seeking to stop their books from being scanned.

Verba said he hoped that in the future, HOLLIS might also link to digital copies of books from libraries outside Harvard, although there are no such current arrangements.

“The ideal is that this will be one enormous digitized book library,” he said. “It shouldn’t matter whether it came from Harvard or Michigan.”

—Staff writer David Jiang can be reached at djiang@fas.harvard.edu.