Open Access E-Books

Library users in Colorado now have access to tens of thousands of additional open-access digitized books and serials through the Prospector Library Catalog. The digitized items originate from the University of Michigan, a partner in the Google Books digitization project. Last year the University of Michigan made available bibliographic records for many of the out-of-copyright titles that Google digitized from its collections. The University then made available online files for each of the digitized works.

The bibliographic records were acquired and enhanced by librarians at the Auraria Library in Denver. After the records were loaded into Skyline, the Auraria Library online catalog, they were uploaded to Prospector, the union catalog of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. Now library patrons from across Colorado have access to the online books via the Prospector catalog. Except for the University of Michigan where the books originated, the Auraria Library was the first library in the nation to make these books available to its users.

There are over 105,000 digitized books and serials freely available in this initial phase of the project. They cover a broad range of topics in the humanities and sciences and are in many different languages. They represent the rich collections found at the University of Michigan and complement local collections held in Colorado libraries. Moreover, the books are "open-access," which means they are in the public domain either because they were published before 1923 or because they are a government publication and therefore not copyrighted.

Adapted From Prospector Press Release, April 10, 2009