[Web4lib] University of California's 100 Libraries Join Google Book-Scanning Project

[Michael McCulley]

I'm pleased to see this development. Overall, competition is good for the
digital library space.

In most of the agreements I've seen, like from Michigan, one benefit the
institutions gain in most of the cases is they get their *own* copy of the
digital materials, item by item. It's not too far-fetched I think to believe
that the UC system will come with unique, hosted, services of this content..
perhaps with tools or resources to the metadata or content that Google may
not implement.

That would be a good thing, in my sense of UC's holdings "online." True, we
might have multiple versions of the "same book content" online in separate
archives, but that's probably going to happen in most of the book digital
repository projects.

I also can foresee that talented library programmers will "smash up" tools
and search engines that combine the repositories contents, and provide
metasearch of them.

Best,
DrWeb

-- 
P. Michael McCulley aka DrWeb
mailto:drweb at san.rr.com
San Diego, CA 
http://drweb.typepad.com/

Quote of the Moment:
 Do not underestimate the power of the Force.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006 6:15:06 PM