Big news from the Google Book Search Library Project today:

The number of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project just got a whole lot bigger with today’s addition of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is a national consortium of 12 research universities, including University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

There are a lot of libraries in that list, and having lived in Northern Illinois for most of my life, I am familiar with many of them (and in fact am planning to visit another one, Ohio State University, within the next couple of weeks to look at a hard-to-find book).

thanks to Ryan Eby for an e-mail post to Web4Lib

Usability in the Library is a web site created by the University of Michigan that contains a smorgasbord of links and references relating to, you guessed rightly, usability in the library.

I especially liked the Resources section of their site (scroll down for a lot of web-based resources).

posted on Web4Lib

Google Book Search announced today that they were making public domain materials available for download.

In the Information Today article, it was stressed that the downloads were the pdf image files, and were not able to be keyword searched, as can be done through Google Books.

Also in the article was the announcement that the University of Michigan is making many of their scanned books available through the MBooks program. This will include not only public domain material, but also their collection of uncopyrightable works (think U.S. government publications), and works for which they have permission to make available.

This seems to be the start of a very beneficial undertaking…

from Open Access News