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Google said on Thursday that another US university will add its books to the Internet search titan's controversial project to make the world's written works available online.
The library books at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society will be digitized and added to the virtual shelves of the Google Books Library Project, according to the arrangement.
The combined total of approximately 7.2 million works in the two libraries were billed as one of the largest collections of historical documents in the United States.
"Wisconsin is in a position to take a leading role in making the primary documents of US government history freely accessible on the Internet for anyone to find and use," university provost Patrick Farrell said in a release.
Others taking part in the Google project included the University of California, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library, Oxford University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Library of Congress.
To assuage concerns of publishers and authors, Google only provides basic information online regarding copyrighted works and directs people to where those books can be bought or borrowed.
Works considered in the public domain are made available for free viewing in full.
US and European publishing houses have gone to court against Mountain View, California, based Google regarding its two-year-old library project.
Last week publishers offered an olive branch to Internet search engines with new technology that would make content widely available but safeguard copyrights.
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AFP 121802 GMT 10 06
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