From Bethany I discovered this story by the Chronicle of Higher Education about the HathiTrust, titled University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library (Jeffrey R. Young, Oct. 13, 2008). “Hathi” is the hindi word for elephant suggesting memory and size. Here is a quote from the HathiTrust site:
As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust (pronounced hah-TEE) brings together the immense collections of partner institutions.
HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. Partnership is open to all who share this grand vision.
The repository, among other things, will pool the volumes digitized by Google in collaboration with the universities so there is a backup should Google lose interest. Large-scale search is being studied now and they expect in November to have preview version available.