Google will identify from across the Big Ten Academic Alliance those holdings that are unique to each institutions (i.e., those volumes that have not been previously located or digitized as part of other agreements). In consultation with university librarians, Google will identify and select Big Ten Academic Alliance collections of distinction; collecting commitments from across the institutions that are nationally recognized by librarians and scholars as deep and historically rich research collections.
These collections of distinction could number in the hundreds across the Big Ten Academic Alliance, but are typified by such examples as Africana at Northwestern University, South Asia at the University of Chicago, folklore at Indiana University, culinary arts at the University of Iowa, the Amelia Earhart papers at Purdue University, the University of Minnesota's Scandinavia and forestry collections, Lincoln materials at the University of Illinois, turfgrass materials at Michigan State University, psychology at Ohio State and dairy science at Wisconsin.
The collections reflect the efforts of the individual libraries to support each university's mission, their faculties' global academic interests, as well as regional histories of the universities' home states. In a digital world, these complementary strengths can be brought together to provide users with one-stop access to rich and diverse resources that were previously difficult to discover and access.