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The article reports on the partnership between Google and 17 schools for a pilot program to enable searching among DSpace repositories, in July 2004. DSpace is an open-source software designed to assist colleges and universities in creating, managing, and maintaining digital repositories. There are currently about 125 schools using this software, but no tool existed that enabled searching across repositories instead of just within them. The number of documents available for searching has been one point of contention for DSpace. Each of the 17 participants had an average of 1,000 papers in its digital archive. While some universities had considerably more than 1,000 documents, most hovered around 100 and many had considerably fewer. Universities involved in the project are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; Australian National University, Canberra; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Cranfield University, England; European University Institute, Domenico DiFies, Italy; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China; Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis; Minho University; Ohio State University, Columbus; University of Arizona, Tucson; University of Calgary, Atlanta; University of Oregon, Eugene; University of Parma, Italy; University of Rochester, New York; University of Toronto, Ontario; University of Washington, Seattle; and University of Wisconsin.

Reports on the partnership of search engine Google Inc. with universities to provide a way of searching the institutions' collections of scholarly papers. Information included in the archives.