The Stanford University Libraries have been developing, fostering, and preserving digital research materials for many years. Among other efforts, it installed an early page turning robotic book scanner, and it maintains several labs specialized for digital preservation of diverse materials: books, audio and video, maps, photographs and other flat graphics, etc. The key problem has always been that of scale: there is far more to be done than resources available to do them. The Google Books project offered a partial solution to the scaling problem, and Stanford seized the opportunity to preserve and index its books through Google's efforts, as one of the five original Google Books partner libraries.

 

Production continues, as of Fall 2010, and Stanford looks forward to further cooperative effort with Google to improve access to its holdings at least through keyword indexing and eventually to conduct sophisticated text-mining, "non-consumptive" research with millions of digitized books. Supporting position documents are linked to this page.