Cornell University Library is partnering with Google Inc. to digitize materials from the library's collections and make them available online through Google Book Search.

Google Book Search, which can be reached from the main Google search page, allows users to search the full text of books to find ones that interest them and learn where to find them. The search returns an "About this book" page with basic bibliographic data and links to stores that have the book for sale and libraries where it can be borrowed.

If a book is in public domain, the full text will be available online. For books protected by copyright, users will get the basic background (such as the book's title and the author's name) and at most a few lines of text related to their search.

About 500,000 volumes from Cornell's collection of nearly 8 million will be digitized over the next six years, including both public domain and copyrighted works.

Cornell is the 27th institution to join the Google Book Search Library Project, which includes the New York Public Library, 19 other universities and several European libraries. Cornell Library will work with Google to choose materials that complement the contributions of the project's other partners. Because of Cornell's role as New York's land-grant university, Mann Library's collections in the agricultural and life sciences as well as the related social sciences are expected to be of high interest.

"Having Google index our collections is like having a massive concordance to the information in our books," said Janet A. McCue, director of Mann Library.

Books selected will be shipped to a Google scanning facility, and Google will bear all the costs. In addition to making the materials available through its online search service, Google also will provide Cornell with a digital copy of all the materials scanned.

Cornell Library is involved in several other initiatives aimed at putting the university's special and core collections online, including partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon.com and the U.S. Agriculture Information Network. A list of Cornell digital collections is available at http://rdc.library.cornell.edu.

Cornell has been a leader in digitization of print materials, with particular emphasis on preserving historical and out-of-print material and making it available to scholars throughout the world on the Internet. The partnership with Google will advance this work, said interim university librarian Anne R. Kenney. "As a major research library, Cornell University Library is pleased to join its peer institutions in this partnership with Google," she said. "The outcome of this relationship is a significant reduction in the time and effort associated with providing scholarly full-text resources online."