[Web4lib] Google Print gets new name

[Lars Aronsson]

Richard Wiggins wrote:

> Today, for this crowd, that is all understandable, parsable. For 
> the prototypical school girl in Carthage, Tennessee searching 
> the Google Books Search collection, is the book from 1899 in 
> full text superior to the book from 2005 in snippet?

Is availability important?  Yes it is.  This problem is a lot 
older than Google, and really has nothing to do with Google.
Or maybe it has everything to do with Google and the Internet, 
since they both make (some) stuff more available, so that it 
overshadows other stuff.

If your school library has the Bible but not the Quran, what 
religion will the children learn?  How can you help?  You can 
donate Bibles (or the Quran) to your school library.  People make 
available the works they think are important.

I digitize Scandinavian literature.  There are 38 million Poles 
and 9 million Swedes, but far more Swedish than Polish literature 
on the web.  I win, they lose.

Books (newspapers, magazines, music albums, movies) from 2005 are 
in print and have reviews on Amazon.com and get mentioned in 
blogs.  They are highly available.  Books from 1875 are out of 
copyright and can be digitized and made available in full.  Works 
from 1955 or 1985 are not so fortunate, because they are in 
copyright but mostly out of print.  This is a problem if we think 
1955 and 1985 are worth remembering.

A prototypical school girl wrote to Project Runeberg the other day 
and asked if the Bible was in copyright (our scanned 1917 edition 
is not) and if she could modernize some words for a schoolwork she 
was preparing. To her, "the Bible" was apparently the one she 
found on our site (runeberg.org/bibeln).  Her question shows a 
number of misconceptions, but is that our problem? Our answer was 
that it's not under copyright and she can do what she wants to the 
text.  Whether altering the source text is appropriate for a 
schoolwork, ought to be a question for her teacher (not for us!), 
but does the teacher even understand that this could be a problem?  
Does the teacher care that the pupil is not quoting from the new 
official (Swedish) Bible translation from 2000?  It too is 
available for free online (www.bibeln.se), but the text isn't 
searchable by Google because of how that website was designed.  
That is not my problem, since I like the 1917 translation better.  
I win again.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/