Google's controversial project to digitize books from the world's great libraries received a boost from the University of California.

Google said it would fund the scanning "several million" of the University of California's 34 million titles, reports Reuters. UC has 100 libraries on 10 campuses across the state and ranks as the largest research and academic library in the world. Authors' and publishers' groups have sued Google to block the scanning of copyrighted library books; Google counters that its project enjoys "fair use" protection, since its search results offer only snippets from copyrighted works.

Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library are also involved in Google Book Search. Some of those libraries, to avoid the controversy, have said they would, for now, scan only out-of-copyright works.

UC, however, joins Michigan in sharing Google's "fair use" view and plans to also scan copyrighted works, according to Jennifer Colvin, a spokeswoman for the UC's digital library group.