[Web4lib] Interesting article on Google Book Search

[Jennifer Heise]

>
> "Can you cite some examples? Because the point I was making is that even
> non-critical comments come up for the torn-orifice treatment. I would
> like to see the messages from the loud librarians (so unladylike!) who
> are talking about the Great Evil Plan."
>
> Yeah, I can't tell the Google-bashers from the Google-apologists without
> a scorecard.  :-)



I'm the person who posted the original note that sparked this exchange,
> and who has posted quite a few other notes pointing out interesting
> writings about Google. I do this to try to generate some critical
> discussion of the various things that Google is doing (and I mean
> "critical" as in careful evaluation/judgment, and not as in finding
> fault).



Here's one of the original quotes from the original article:
" And it dangerously elevates Google's role and responsibility as the
steward -
with no accountability - of our information ecosystem."

I read that as "Google is big and popular and we can't control it, and
therefore letting Google do this is bad because it will make it bigger and
more popular and we still can't control it."

Admittedly, my take on the whole situation goes right back to the 'Gmail is
an invasion of privacy and we have to warn people about it!' discussion. So,
I'm biased. And I guess you could do a search across the last couple of
months of Web4Lib on Google and come up with a good sample of non-bashers;
but my random sampling suggests that the picking apart Google as opposed to
other services seems to have a very long history.

I want to see librarians competing with Google by providing more and new
cool stuff to their public, not just by trying to steer users away from
Google. Now, when I asked the last time what we were doing to improve the
design of our library catalogs, I got zilch. What are we doing to implement
searching across multiple digitized collections, at multiple institutions?
What are we doing to improve indexing and metadata in our resources, such as
catalogs? What are we doing to make our book databases less klunky?  For
that matter, are we academics taking steps to make citations to our
faculties' publications easier to find? Are we even making any headway at
helping intellectual property *creators* have some control over access to
their own work?