Adding University of California would be a significant addition….

University of California May Join Google’s Library Project – Los Angeles Times
In a move with major significance for the worlds of academic research and publishing, the University of California is in talks to join Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online.

Google is keen to have access to UC’s 34 million volumes from 100 libraries on 10 campuses, which is described as collectively the largest academic research library in the world. UC wants to delve more deeply into the Internet revolution with a deep-pockets partner like Google paying the costs of scanning books.

Even with the addition of the University of California collections, significant gaps will remain. Brian Lavoie, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Lorcan Dempsey did an analysis of the original “Google 5″ libraries published in D-Lib Magazine (September 2005). They compared the collective holdings of the Google 5 against the system-wide collection in OCLC:

The proportion of the system-wide collection actually covered by GDLP, once duplicate holdings across the five institutions are removed, is about one third (33 percent), or 10.5 million unique books out of the 32 million in the system-wide collection. About two-thirds (67 percent) of the system-wide collection, or 21.6 million books, are not held by any Google 5 library.

Tags: Google