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University Complutense of Madrid and Google to Make Hundreds of Thousands of Books Available Online

Announcement
September 26, 2006

Browsing the library stacks of the University Complutense of Madrid is like taking a trip through the great moments of Spanish and Latin American literature with Miguel de Cervantes, Quevedo, Calderón, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Garcilaso de la Vega and many more.

Now, those authors’ great works will be accessible to everyone around the world, as the University Complutense of Madrid becomes the first Spanish-language library to join the Google Books Library Project. Book lovers and researchers from Australia to Argentina, and South Africa to Spain, will be able to find out whether, as Cervantes wrote, "the pen is the tongue of the mind," or as Calderón claimed, "life is but a dream."

Working together, Google and the University Complutense of Madrid will digitise the university’s hundreds of thousands of public domain works, so that anyone, at anytime will be able to view, browse, read, and even download the full texts from the library’s historic and special collections. The library of the Complutense University of Madrid is the largest university library in Spain.

"Out of copyright books previously only available to people with access to Madrid’s Complutense University Library, or the money to travel, will now be accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, wherever they live," said Carlos Berzosa, Chancellor of the Complutense University of Madrid. "We are quite literally opening our library to the world. The opportunities for education are phenomenal and we are delighted to be working with Google on this project."

In addition, the cooperation with the University Complutense of Madrid will further enrich Book Search’s multilingual collection of public domain works. In addition to Spanish texts, the university’s collection also includes French, German, Latin, Italian, and English books.

The University Complutense of Madrid is the second European library to join the Library Project, which also includes the Bodleian Library at Oxford, University of California, University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the New York Public Library. Google is also conducting a pilot project with the Library of Congress.

The Google Books Library Project digitises books from major libraries around the world and makes their collections searchable on Google Book Search. More information can be found at: books.google.com.

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