[Web4lib] University of California's 100 LibrariesJoinGoogle Book-Scanning Project

[Karen Coyle]

> Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Cnet that while he was 
> pleased the university will continue to work with the OCA, he 
> criticized UC for "privatizing its library system" by agreeing to 
> Google's limitations on distributing and sharing copies of digitized 
> books. "They're effectively giving their library to a single 
> corporation," he said. "Having a public institution decide to go with 
> Google's restrictions doesn't help the idea of libraries being open in 
> the future."
This brings up one of the main questions on my mind: what does the UC 
contract say about sharing the files that Google creates? Fortunately, 
UC is a public institution subject to the California public records act, 
so I'm hoping that we will soon be able to see a copy of that contract, 
as we did with the Michigan one.

There are other issues as well, including the quality control one that 
we've brought up here from time to time. Google's goal is to produce 
searchable text, and they can do so fairly quickly and inexpensively by 
tolerating a certain amount of error. UC's goal seems to be different -- 
there are hints that they are looking at the Google solution as 
providing them with almost a substitute for the book itself.* My fear is 
that all of this effort is going to turn out to be just the digital 
version of microfiche -- good from a technology point of view, but lousy 
for library users.
kc

* See comments by Schoettlander about preservation in Aug. 9 
announcement http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/2006/aug09.html, 
as well as the comment from Hume, "Amongst them, of course, is the free 
and unfettered full-text access we can provide to our public domain 
holdings."

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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
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