Royal Society a compliment to Lord Brouncker, a peer and the first President of the Royal Society. The society's motto, "Nullius in verba", is Latin for "Take nobody's word for it". It was adopted to signify the fellows' determination to establish facts via experiments and comes from Horace's "Epistles", where he compares himself to a gladiator who, having retired, is free from control. The society's core members are the fellows: scientists and engineers from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth selected based on having made "a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science". Fellows
Sidney Verba areas in which Verba's contributions at Harvard have become the model for other academic and research libraries: Verba was ultimately responsible for Harvard's participation in the Google Books Library Project, which involves a series of agreements between Google and major international libraries through which a collection of its public domain books will be scanned in their entirety and made available for free to the public online. Verba's role encompassed developing digitization protocols, addressing logistical and operations issues, and administering the project. The more difficult part of his job required moderating the institutional debate about anticipated consequences inherent in conventional content-vs.-collection