Google to digitise University of Texas library

Latin American collection among one million works to be available online.

Google has reached an agreement to digitise more than one million books from the University of Texas Libraries .

Among the items to be archived are parts of the university's Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection featuring over 960,000 works from Mexico, South America, the Caribbean and Central America.

Google plans to incorporate the digitised material into its Google Books Library Project which aims to create a searchable online database of books from around the world.

The Google Books project came under fire in late 2005 when the Author's Guild sued Google for digitising works without permission.

Google has since tried to rally support for the project, including persuading author Cory Doctorow to attend a recent event in New York.

The University of Texas at Austin has 17 libraries containing more than eight million volumes, making it the fifth largest academic library in the US.

Other libraries involved in the Google project include the New York Public Library and the university libraries at Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and Stanford.

Google said that public domain documents from the collection will be freely available to anyone online. Copyrighted materials will display basic information about the book along with a text excerpt and information about where the book can be obtained.