“We’ll figure out where the issues are, and there are a lot of issues from a lot of angles,” he said.
Verba said that he would have liked to discuss the idea with faculty and students before beginning the project but was precluded from doing so by an agreement with Google.
“This made me, to be honest, somewhat uneasy, because I wouldn’t like to do something major to the library without revealing it” to the Harvard community, he said.
He added that Harvard is not obligated to expand on the pilot program.
University President Lawrence H. Summers said yesterday he was excited because the project would make Harvard’s collections easier to search and more widely accessible.
“I think that it offers the opportunity to make our library an even stronger school resource,” he said.
—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.