There has been some interesting blogging going on in the library world related to Google and their scanning project. Recently, the University of Michigan’s provost turned head librarian Paul Courant started his own blog and talked about his library’s partnership with Google. It’s worth clicking over and reading the full posts, including his response to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s critique of his first post (Courant has two posts up there now). The following are a few quotes worth reading from the first post.
Courant summarizes his opponent’s argument against Michigan’s collaboration with Google and gives his rebuttal:
“One of the things that surprises me most about reactions to the Google Library Project is that smart people whom I respect seem to think that the only reason that a university library would be involved with Google is because, in some combination, its leadership is stupid, evil, or at best intellectually lazy. To the contrary, although I may be proved wrong, I believe that the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better. Four years from now, all seven million volumes in the University of Michigan Libraries will have been digitized – the largest such library digitization project in history.”
Why partnering with Google is good economically and intellecutally:
“Google is on pace to scan over 7 million volumes from U-M libraries in six years at no cost to the University….Anyone who searches U-M’s library catalog, Mirlyn, can access the scanned files via our MBooks interface. That’s right, anyone.”
Courant refuting the argument that Google controls the scanned images, leaving Michigan (and other libraries like it) with little more than their books:
“After Google scans a book, they return the book to the library (like any other user), and they give us a copy of the digital file. Google is not the only entity controlling access to the collection – the University of Michigan and other partner libraries control access as well.”
Why Google’s partnership is important to student access today:
“We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically. At the rate that OCA [Open Content Alliance, which I wrote about a week or so ago] is digitizing things (and I say the more the merrier and the faster the better) that generation will be dandling great-grandchildren on its knees before these great collections can be found electronically. At Michigan, the entire collection of bound print will be searchable, by anyone in the world, about when children born today start kindergarten.”
Overall, I think that Courant does a nice job describing why it is not as bad as some think for a library to “be in bed with Google.” I’m still new to this profession and am part of the generation that likes to have access to nearly everything online. So, I think it is understandable for someone like me to be in favor of getting books up there on the Internet as quickly as possible, as long as the data is not corrupted by bad scans or false information.
In his response, Vaidhyanathan takes issue with the, “We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically,” statement. If we take him completely literally as Vaidhyanathan does, it is a very broad statement without any evidence. However, I have seen the statistics for this library and noticed a dramatic decline in the amount of print use, especially in reference. Meanwhile, the numbers for the electronic databases has gone up significantly. Increasingly, I think, students expect information to be found online. This expectation may be self-centered and wrong, but they (myself included) have grown up with the Internet as the place to search for information. I know I’m going against what I, as a librarian, should be advocating. But, libraries have to change with the times and not become irrelevant. That’s a bold statement, I know, and I don’t necessarily disagree with Vaidhyanathan in that we should be skeptical of Google’s dealings with these books. However, it’s a tough situation to be in because we (libraries and librarians) don’t necessarily have the money or the time to do what the OCA is doing. Well, I should qualify that statement. We probably do have the time, it’s just a very slow process and if someone is willing to make that process go extremely quickly, I think you have to give it serious consideration.
What do you think? Should we be farming out the digitization of books to a company like Google (or Microsoft, et al.)? What do you/don’t you like about Google Book? Have you even used it? What problems have you seen that haven’t been addressed?
