The NY Times reports on a pending announcement from Google about new digitization partnerships with libraries.
Google plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.
Project Gutenberg
The Project Gutenberg already has a collection of over 13,000 books in the public domain available free for download. The collection is also fully searchable.
http://www.gutenberg.org/
University of Mich entire library to be Googled. htm
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend14e_20041214
slashdot 🙂
As usual, I found it interesting to see what the folks over at Slashdot had to say. Seems like a lot of them hope this info will be used to beef up Google Scholar. There’s also questions about whether or not there’ll be ads alongside the text of the books
Amazing Scary and HUGE Story
This + OCLC! eek, this is pretty scary, or amazing, or both.
“digital card catalog” jeeze, c’mon, what is this 1983? They can’t use OPAC?
“Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today,”
Wow!!! and that’s coming from a librarian.
There’s not much mention of copyright & ownership, let’s hope it’s all public domain.
Like battuta mentioned, Project Gutenberg is already doing something similiar.
That Michigan article that Marlene pointed to is wild. This is amazing, ALL books they hold are being scanned.
And like Samantha said, read those Slashdot comments.
Overall I’d say this is huge. It might be the tipping point on ebooks and such.
Commentary from Teleread
David Rothman, over at Teleread, as always, has thoughtful commentary on this announcement.
Publishers
From the article:
The challenge for publishers in coming years will be to continue to have libraries serve as major influential buyers of their books, without letting the newly vast digital public reading rooms undermine the companies’ ability to make money commissioning and publishing authors’ work.
Seems to me that they are assuming that new material will make its way into this digital collection. These libraries have no right to grant scanning of new materials. What they can do is provide Google with a source of pre-1930 materials that are in the Public Domain. Copyright is going to keep Google from touching the new things. Publishers will actually be able to make more money because when people discover a pre 1930 book on Google they might want to purchase a print copy of it. New markets will emerge for old material becuase Google will do the job of making that old material known.
This goes along with LOC latest lecture series
I saw it last night on CSPAN – pretty exciting time for libraries!
link on to webcast is available at http://www.c-span.org/congress/digitalfuture.asp
Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive. Kahle is the person who first developed the idea and tools to archive the Web. He will explain how he did that, and why it’s important to our everday use of the internet. The title of his talk is “Universal Access to Knowledge.”
And how are they going to organise it?
Library catalogue: constructed according to well-established cataloguing rules, with different access points and lots of metadata to help you identify and locate suitable documents.
Google: a very nifty search engine, but based around full-text searching. Not so much concerned with metadata.
Google+scanned in library books: lots (and lots) of text. The article doesn’t say anything about bibliographic organisation or the use of any sort of metadata. How, then, is one to locate the truly relevant book?
I think this is a great idea, for sure – but seems like there are some big questions that haven’t been answered (or, at least, haven’t been explained – I can’t believe that no-one at Harvard, Oxford or the other schools noticed this problem).