Library Web Chic

Wed. IL 2005 Keynote

Roy Tennant and Rich Wiggins

Google Print Making the Virtual Library Real - Rich Wiggins

Rich has a great sense of humor and started by showing a number of jokes, including a hilarious cartoon about why Google should never be bought by Microsoft. He then started to talk about the idea of digitizing the entire Library of Congress. Most digital library projects have been selective digitization of a particular set of documents. So why don’t we do something bigger?

This leads to questions like how much space is it going to take to digitize all this stuff? The basic idea is that the cost of storage is decreasing, so is the cost of broadband delivery, and digital imaging is getting cheaper. With the right technology wiggins suggests that we can get the cost down to 5 cents a page. Lesk points out that the cost of putting a book on the shelf is greater than the cost of the book itself.

What about OCRing the documents? The cost of OCR is decreasing but it is more expensive. If it is worth keeping the item in the collection then it is worth digitizing it.

What are the major barriers?

• Rights Management
• The Benefits Doesn’t Justify the Cost

Benefits

• Preservation
• Access
• Improved Digitization Technology
• Improved Standards
• Large Scale Rights Management

Google Print has taught us to think big. So let’s build it! Wiggins made a analogy with this vision and the vision of the Apollo program. This endeavor has many serious challenges: technology, institutional, and legal (copyright). What is different now is that a company is taking on this initiative.

Why Trust Google

• They are smart
• They are agile and innovation
• They show no fear
They are worth $100 billion
• They won’t do this alone.

Google Catalyst for Digitization? Or Library Destruction?


Roy Tennant

Roy agreed with Rich on the following: “More access is better and easier access is better.” However, he said that we need to pay serious attention to some issues (Scary Monsters) with letting Google solely take on the digitization task.

Scary Monsters

• Copyright Cataclysm
• Libraries have enjoyed the Fair Use protections
• Google is attempting to shield their activities uder the same umbrella may destroy it for all of us
• Closed Access to Open Material - don’t direct people to freely available to public domain works
• Blind Wholesale Digitization
  • Large research collections are not weeded by policy (We keep lots of crap)
  • Copyright is going to limit access to recent material, and since users use what’s handy, older material will win over newer.
• Ads
  • Google’s profit comes from avertising
  • Google needs eyeballs, which content helps give them
  • How long before we see ads in our books research results list
• Secrecy
  • Agreements between Google and libraries have been kept secret
  • University of Michigan revealed their after a FOI challege (months afrer the project was announced)
  • Rumor is that University of Michigan has the best arrangement
• Longevity
  • Google is a publically trade company
  • Libraries have been around for a long time
  • Who should we trust?

Adam Smith, Product Manager for Google Print and Google Scholar

• Welcome all comments, it’s what makes our products better
• Better to have the information out there to see how people use and access it.
• Walk a difficult path with trying to keep many different parties happy.
• Want to make information more accessible
• There are issues such as copyright.
• We welcome other efforts and we love the fact there are other efforts from the community.
• Two projects: Publisher books, Library books

Comments

Scary monster that was not brought up is privacy issues. - Google has a privacy policy for these services. It has been updated and consult that.

Secrecy of the project and the press coverage of the program. Little information initially deciminated information about the project. The project’s focus is making the text of the books searchable rather than making the books themselves available in fulltext.

How to connect the discovery of the works with accessing the work? - Working with OCLC, OpenURL resolvers (Google Scholar)