Why did the U.Va. Library decide to join the project?
The U.Va. Library has long (in Internet years) been a pioneer in digitizing public domain works so they can be available online. Since 1992 we have created several thousand public domain “e-texts” and made them accessible through our digital collections. Our collections are especially strong in American history, literature, and the humanities. We are happy to join the group of major libraries participating in the Google Book Search project. Not only will the project help more readers discover more books, but Google’s work will also provide us with additional e-texts, letting us quickly complete the “e-text” project we began back in 1992. This project will let us digitally preserve hundreds of thousands of texts from the University’s important collections. Many of these materials are out of print and hard to find. For those materials in the public domain, Google will make those works fully viewable through their website, and U.Va. will receive digital preservation copies of all our cont
