In June 2007, the Penn State University Libraries joined the other members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in an agreement to digitize select collections across all its libraries, up to 10 million volumes, as part of the Google Book Search project.

The CIC, the academic side of the Big Ten, is a consortium of 12 research universities including Penn State, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.