Google Print as the library's mission

[Karen Coyle]

These are the quotes from the press releases that I react to with some
dread. I thought I would gather them up here because it's possible that
not everyone has encountered them. There are similar statements in the
various newspaper articles. What I read here is very clearly that these
libraries see Google Print as a library service. I have nothing against
Google Print as a Google service, but if it's a library service then I
would want it to be bound by the same rules as other library services,
in terms of accessibility, privacy, and other service values.

- kc
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Quotes from the press releases:

NYPL:
"The New York Public Library is participating in the project because it
is central to our mission - making our collections democratically
accessible to a global audience, free of charge. Without Google's
assistance, the cost of digitizing our books - in both time and dollars
- would be prohibitive. This is a win-win situation for everyone
involved."

Stanford:

Stanford University today announced an ambitious plan to cooperate with
Google Inc. in digitizing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of
books from the shelves of Stanford libraries and making them available
to readers worldwide and without charge.

"This is a great leap forward," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford
University Librarian, and publisher of both the Stanford University
Press and the HighWire Press (Stanford's online co-publishing service
for scholarly journals). "We have been digitizing texts for years now to
make them more accessible and searchable, but with books, as opposed to
journals, such efforts have been severely limited in scope for both
technical and financial reasons. The Google arrangement catapults our
effective digital output from the boutique scale to the truly
industrial. Through this program and others like it, Stanford intends to
promote learning and to stimulate innovation."

Umich

“Libraries have long played a critical role in connecting users with the
ideas and voices of scholars throughout time,” said William Gosling,
University Librarian.   “This partnership with Google affords us the
opportunity to chart new methods of bringing these resources and the
expertise of the Library to the academic community and as a public good
to a broader user population.   It is an exciting project that will
benefit our users in direct and transformative ways.”
-- 
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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