Global Cooperation for Global Access: The Million Book Project Denise Troll Covey Associate Dean, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Summary This paper describes the rationale for and international collaborations involved in a project to digitize one million books and offer them free-to-read on the surface web by 2007. Led by computer scientists and librarians at Carnegie Mellon, Million Book Project partners include universities and research institutes; for- profit and not-for-profit organizations; governments and government agencies; librarians and archivists; software developers; and commercial publishers, university presses, and scholarly associations. Areas of cooperation addressed in this paper include collection development, copyright permission, digital registry, book acquisition and shipping, scanning, quality control, sustainability, and added-value services. 1. Introduction The Million Book Project is an international collaboration to digitize and provide free-to-read access to one million books on the surface web by 2007. The scanning is being done in India and China, with labor funded by the respective governments, following preservation-quality standards developed by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (2001) and endorsed by the Digital Library Federation (2002). The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the initial collection development meeting in 2001, and in 2002 provided $3.6 million to purchase equipment and support administrative travel. With NSF’s approval, some of the travel dollars were allocated to fund the pilot shipment of books to India for scanning. Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and the University Libraries are providing project leadership, with the full support of the University President and Provost. Provost Mark Kamlet led delegations to China in 2001 and India in 2002 to develop and formalize project plans. Raj Reddy, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science, is responsible for the Project vision and technology. Michael Shamos, Principal Research Scientist and Intellectual Property Attorney, addresses legal issues related to the Project. Gloriana St. Clair, Dean of University Libraries, is responsible for coordinating content selection and acquisition among U.S. library partners. Content is being provided by U.S. libraries and by partner institutions in India and China. The project in India is being led by the Indian Institute of Science. Participating institutions in India include Anna University; Goa University; Indian Institute of Information Technology; International Institute of Information Technology; Mysore University; Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy; Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams; Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation; and University of Pune. The project in China is being led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Participating institutions in China include Beijing University; Fudan University; Ministry of Education of China; Nanjing University; Peking University; State Planning Commission of China; Tsinghua University; Zheijiang University; and Zhezing University.