And also with Google. As the first library in Germany the State Library of Bavaria in Munich co-operates with Google in the latter’s book project. Google has the permission to scan one million out of the ten million books of the Bavarian State Library and make them available on the internet.
Thus, the Munich based library joins the club of world class university libraries such as those in Harvard and Oxford which via Google made their treasures available to the world too. The State Library of Bavaria is a scientific library and besides the Ludwig Maximilians University and the Technical University, which are pure university libraries, and cares for the needs of the students of these two universities.
The State University is going to benefit from the co-operation too, given that Google will cover a major part of the scanning costs and thus at the same time is going to preserve many books which anyway would have to be digitalized in order to protect them from paper disintegration. Among the books, besides numerous scientific papers, there are also precious ancient manuscripts from Europe and Asia.
This project will at last also make accessible a large range of technical and scientific papers to R&D of small and medium-sized entities. Such papers so far had only been available after strong manual search efforts and long waiting times. 