October 30, 2007

It's been a longtime goal of the University of Virginia. and now that goal is becoming a reality.

In a partnership with google, thousands of books from UVa are now available online. With help from the search engine giant UVa's books are being digitized and made available on the web.

"We've been actually scanning books with them now for a few months and fairly recently the books we scanned started to come online on google book search" said Ben Bunnell, a google manger.

"We have a good many books that are actually up now and you can search them and you can actually see the full text of some of the books as well" said Esther Onega, UVa's project manager.

It's a project that google has been working on for the past three years with different libraries but it wasn't until last year that UVa became a valuable partner.

"UVa has worked out great. We're really excited to be partners with UVa. They offer some really interesting collections that a lot of the partners that we are working with didn't offer" said Bunnell.

And the public is already seeing the benefits.

"There have been some faculty here that are using them for their reserve list and also I just recently had someone from England contact me about one of the books that he found on google book search because he was doing some genealogy work so he was interested in more information about the book so I was able to help him" said Onega.

It's a project that benefits everyone as UVa's library becomes bigger than it ever could have imagined.