You won’t see many patrons clothed in pajamas as they peruse the bookshelves at the University of Michigan’s libraries, but through virtual access, pajamas are now appropriate attire when you're looking for a book.

In partnership with Google, the U-M is digitizing its entire print collection, making it available to Web surfers in their robes and slippers through Google Books.

“The libraries have been doing digitization for about 10 years at a rate of about 10,000 books a year, but with 8 million volumes, that was going to take quite awhile,” said. Liene Karels, director of communications for the libraries.

The partnership with Google brought with it a large-scale scanning operation that has meant a job that was going to take many years is now almost half done.

Google has also been working with other university and public libraries to digitize their collections. Through Google Books, books that are in the public domain and not subject to copyright laws are available to be read in their entirety online for free.

For those works that are subject to copyright laws, which are most books published after 1922, public users will be able to access 20 percent of the work for free and buy further online access to the books that interest them.

“This could change all kinds of things when it comes to research,“ Karels said. “It is really a sea change in terms of research.”

Students and researchers who once had to physically visit another library to gain access to rare and special collections can now access many of those works online.

While looking at a piece online doesn’t offer the same tactile experience as looking at a book, the scanned images do offer the reader an accurate representation of a work -- a book published in the 1600s has a distinctly different look than those published today. If a scanned work featured notes and notations in the margins, a researcher is privy to those too.

Looking at a work online also has the added benefit of optical character recognition, in which the scanned works are translated into languages and researchers can do a word search on a whole work.

“So, let’s say you take books from a certain period, you can then look up a word, like Napoleon, and you might find information on him in an area you would never expect, like a cook book,” Karels said.

While that kind of technology is exciting for anyone, Jack Bernard of the U-M Council for Disability Concerns said it’s especially groundbreaking for people with visual impairments or disabilities that make using printed materials difficult. “This is like a library card that will actually work for people with print disabilities,” Bernard said. “It was one of the driving forces for originally coming to an agreement with Google. ... The works they digitize be accessible to those with print disabilities through technology like screen readers, screen enlargement programs and refreshable Braille.” Apart from Google Books, U-M, in partnership with other universities, has started its own digital repositoryknown as the Hathi Trust Digital Library. “Because Google is a corporation, they might not be around forever,” Karels said. “We‘re taking all this digital material and treating it like we treat library material. We want to protect it forever… we’re basically backing-up history.”