GRIN Transfer: A Production-Ready Tool for Libraries to Retrieve Digital Copies from Google Books

This technical report introduces GRIN Transfer, an open-source Python pipeline designed to help libraries retrieve and manage their Google Books collections through Google’s Return Interface (GRIN). Developed in the course of assembling Harvard Library’s Institutional Books dataset, the tool addresses challenges related to rate-limiting, fragmented metadata, and large-scale collection retrieval. The report also presents an updated Institutional Books processing pipeline compatible with GRIN Transfer outputs, offering libraries an end-to-end workflow for retrieving, structuring, and enhancing digitized book collections.