February 28, 2020 The University of California Libraries recently contributed the 4,500,000th digitized book from their collections to HathiTrust Digital Library–a tremendous achievement resulting from 15 years of continuous digitization work.

The vast majority of these millions of volumes were generated via the Google Books Library Project, which UC joined in 2006. That year the mass digitization of UC’s library collections began in earnest when the Northern Research Library Facility (NRLF) started sending books to the Google Books Library Project for scanning. UC’s work with the Google Books Library Project has never paused–by the time UC’s 3,000,000th volume was digitized in 2010, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, and UCLA had all begun sending collections to Google for digitization. Since then, UC San Francisco, the Southern Research Library Facility (SRLF), UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara have all participated, with UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UCLA, and NRLF continuing to do so.