[Web4lib] Interesting article on Google Book Search

[Grace J. Agnew]

Karen,

Thank you for this thoughtful, insightful post!.  You have articulated a 
lot of my own concerns and issues.  The greatest benefit of the 
Internet, in my opinion, is not that it readily exploits digital 
technologies to capture and display digital information but that it 
exploits and promotes many telecommunications and access strategies to 
bring together people and information from so many diverse sources.  I 
think society is being transformed because people can share information 
so readily and traverse many paths to pull together information from 
many areas of expertise  and many points of view.  I have had concerns 
that Google might address our hunger for the "one stop shop" of 
information but not our need to see many sides to complex questions in a 
free and open manner.  A one stop shop for my holiday shopping at 
Christmas might possibly be a good thing.  When I am researching the 
serious illness of a loved family member, I want it all--the clinical 
trials, the holistic treatments, the caveats against the holistic 
treatments.  There are a lot of things, from researching an article to 
buying a car to trying to save a life where I don't think an "Internet 
Walmart" is necessarily a good idea, and it might actually be really 
dreadful. 

I appreciate people like Karen and particularly Roy Tennant who keep the 
conversation about Google going.  I was at the LITA Forum where one of 
the keynote speakers publicly chided Roy (another keynote speaker) for 
presuming to critique Google's approach to information mining.  I 
wouldn't have expected this at a conference that had both "Library" and 
"Information" in its title.

I was never a reference librarian but way back in the day, when I took 
Reference 101 in library school, my excellent teacher, the late Liz 
Futas, gave us "trick" reference questions to research that generally 
had at least two answers, often diametrically opposed.  Her lesson was 
that we should never stop at the first reference source but continue 
digging and present the user with the multiple paths and results we 
found and let the user exercise ultimate judgment over what answer met 
her information needs.

Have we strayed so far from our roots that we don't recognize the 
ambiguity of information itself and we don't remember that there are no 
black and white answers to anything?  Particularly those of us who work 
with computers and constantly manipulate technology to add the missing 
"ghost in the machine"--the "maybe" instead of the absolutist "yes/no" 
of the digital bit. 

Everything depends on the context we bring to the discussion and the 
"right" answer is never more absolute than a consensus that a community 
decides it can live with, after honest and vigorous debate.   The role 
of Google as an information provider is an interesting and important 
question, and Google has opened itself to conjecture and debate when it 
stepped so vigorously into the public information marketplace.  I think 
we owe it to ourselves and our users to keep the Google conversation going.

Grace Agnew

K.G. Schneider wrote:

>As a meta-observation, not only do we not bash Google on Web4Lib, but at
>times we seem to adulate this company and grant it extraordinary leeway and
>leniency (as sometimes happens with Apple, whose "iTunes uber alles"
>approach to DRM rarely gets a real sharp finger-wag, not to mention that
>sacred e-cow, Wikipedia). When I mentioned last week that I trip over the
>name of GBS, I received private email that that "Google made a good choice
>and deserve to have that choice honored rather than ignored." The emotional
>quality of the mail I received really startled me. If I refer to my favorite
>drive-in restaurant as The Old In and Out, as I often do, would you really
>care? Would you tell me that it made you angry? Frustrated? That it meant I
>was "bashing" Google? 
>
>I concur with this comment from if:book: "[Siva's] essay contains in
>abundance what has largely been missing from the Google books debate:
>intellectual courage. Vaidhyanathan, an intellectual property scholar and
>'avowed open-source, open-access advocate,' easily could have gone the
>predictable route of scolding the copyright conservatives and spreading the
>Google gospel. But he manages to see the big picture beyond the intellectual
>property concerns. This is not just about economics, it's about knowledge
>and the public interest." 
>
>I'm not anti-Google. I'm not anti-digitization. I do not join the global
>battle to eradicate snippet-reading. I have my Blog People button. I use
>Google Dead Tree already and can list its many positive benefits both
>individually and perforce culturally. But it is worth asking what it means
>to librarianship to sole-source and privatize all this content, even with
>all the reassurances that Google Means Well. Even with the knowledge that
>the public sector can't and won't do this (given we have much higher
>national priorities such as starting wars on foreign soil and melting polar
>ice caps), that doesn't mean we can't think critically about what this
>project means and whether the arrangement is one that will be good for the
>world in the long run. 
>
>The cheap and easy response is sure, this is great. But I really heed this
>comment: "I think the libraries are getting played badly here and they are
>violating their own principles of openness and public service by letting
>Google take charge and set the terms of this service." This only reflects
>questions and comments I heard at the LITA Google talk at ALA, some of it
>muttered sotto voce, some of it spoken into the microphone--questions and
>comments I'm not sure really got answered. 
>
>Karen G. Schneider
>kgs at bluehighways.com
>
>_______________________________________________
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>Web4lib at webjunction.org
>http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>  
>

-- 

____________________________________________________________

Grace Agnew
Associate University Librarian for Digital Library Systems
Rutgers University Libraries
47 Davidson Road Piscataway, NJ 08854
732/445-5908
gagnew at rci.rutgers.edu

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