This December, Harvard partnered with Google to make millions of the University’s books searchable online in an ambitious and controversial initiative to digitize five library collections.

The Google Print project will allow internet users to browse through uploaded works—in either their complete or excerpted form—free of charge. The University of Michigan, Stanford, the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian in Oxford have joined Harvard in this effort.

The project has garnered criticism from American publishers for copyright infringement and from European library officials for its emphasis on the English language and American culture.

Michigan and Stanford are in the process of digitizing their entire collections—totaling some 15 million books—while the Bodleian is offering around one million books published before 1900.

The Harvard and New York Public Library contributions are smaller still, but across all five libraries, the entire project is still expected to take up to 10 years, with cost estimates ranging from $150 million to $200 million.

According to Pforzheimer University Professor Sid Verba ’53, who is the director of the Harvard University Library (HUL), the partnership with Google marks an unprecedented step in making Harvard’s books accessible to the public.

There was a trial period from December to May in which Harvard provided Google with a random sampling of books which were then scanned on premises because Verba said he was concerned with keeping the collections available to the current Harvard community and avoiding book damage.

In the last six months, however, Google representatives have demonstrated their effective and sensitive scanning technology.

“It is very specifically designed to be non-destructive,” said Adam Smith, Google project manager. “In working with these libraries and their collections, we need to be extremely careful.”

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In December, University President Lawrence H. Summers said he was excited the initiative would make Harvard’s collections easier to search and more widely accessible, and the head of Oxford University has said that the project may be as significant as the printing press. But not all shared this opinion.

Several publishing organizations have claimed that the project infringes on copyright law. According to Sally Morris, Chief Executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society publishers—an international association of over 300 publishers—this sort of digitization may be illegal.

“The law does not permit wholesale copying by a commercial organization of works that are still in copyright,” Morris wrote in an e-mail earlier this year. “It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied.”

Morris explained that the current law calls for Google to get written permission from individual publishers.

A Google spokesperson addressed the potential for copyright infringement by underscoring the corporation’s commitment to working with individual publishers to carefully designate the copyrighted materials.