Search Me?

"It was a very short conversation," Keller says. "Basically they said, 'What do you think about digitizing every book in the library?' And we said, 'Yay!' "

Stanford's librarian scarcely needed convincing about what digitization could do. After the university digitized its card catalogue, he says, use of the collection jumped 50 percent -- simply because books were easier to find. Another successful Stanford venture, HighWire Press, offers access to digitized scholarly journal articles.

Meanwhile, the library has been scanning books itself for decades. A few years ago, it bought a Swiss-made robotic scanner and set it to work in the Green basement. With 50 such robots, Keller calculated -- at a capital cost of something like $75 million -- the university could digitize its library all by itself. He got a few foundations interested, but they backed off.

Small wonder that when the Google offer came along, Keller jumped at it.

Not without a lot of due diligence, however, mostly about the legality of including books like call number E169 D3.

"Copyright 1950, Vantage Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved" reads the notice in "This Is Our Land" -- a clear enough warning at the time, but what does it mean, more than half a century later? The book is not in print, a fact that is easily ascertained. But does Vantage Press even still exist? Was the copyright ever renewed, and if so, who owns it now: the publisher, the author or the author's heirs? These questions are not so easily answered.

Most important, perhaps, even assuming Dean's book is still under copyright, would it be "fair use" for Google to copy it anyway, allowing it to be searched but making only "snippets" of text available for public view? (Fair use is a section of U.S. copyright law that allows portions of a work to be reproduced without permission under certain circumstances -- for example, in criticism, news reporting and scholarship.)

Keller asked Stanford's general counsel to help him consider this question. He consulted Stanford law professors and outside copyright experts, too. "We end up having a big seance," he says. "We get lots of opinions."

He makes no bones about what he was really after. Having his library included in Google's searchable database will be a fine thing, he says, but the real benefit to Stanford will come from the newly digitized copies of its own books that the university will receive from Google as a quid pro quo.

Keller starts ticking off the reasons they'll be so important. One is preservation. "We don't have enough invested in this country," he says, "to assure that printed materials are going to persist." Another is the potential for truly complex search. There are far more sophisticated ways than Google's key word approach through which the library can help its users mine data.

A fully digitized library, Keller enthuses, will be an unbelievable new intellectual resource: a "test bed" in which everyone from anthropologists to zoologists can experiment with varieties of research impossible to imagine before.

Why not go for it?