According to a recent press release, Stanford has officially signed onto the Google Book Search settlement and become a Fully Participating Library. (This is also mentioned on the Google Public Policy Blog.)
University Librarian Michael A. Keller said, "We are highly supportive of the amended settlement, which offers an enormous public good, making the full text of millions of books available to the American public."
Provost John Etchemendy signed the agreement for Stanford University. "This agreement is consistent with Stanford’s mission of sharing and disseminating knowledge, and allows us to expand our participation by sharing more works from our library," Etchemendy said. "We support the efforts to make books more broadly available to the American public and to all of higher education."
Much of the release is the same sort of feel-good rhetoric—it is a press release, after all, and those tend to spin things in the rosiest way possible. Essentially, all it really means is that Stanford has expanded its pre-existing partnership with the Google scanning project. (According to WebProNews, Stanford originally joined up with Google in December 2004.)
Whether the Google Book Search settlement will be allowed to stand is still up in the air.
