[Web4lib] A Library to Last Forever - NY Times OpEd piece on GoogleBook Search

[Jennifer Heise]

> "Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only
> one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the
> country and hope to find it in the stacks."
>

Many commenters making reference to Interlibrary Loan are also
ignoring the fact that the average person does not have access to the
extensive web of Interlibrary Loan services accessible to the majority
of us whose email addresses end in .edu!  Funding for even simple ILLs
in public libraries is very small. I talk every day to people who
struggle to get out of print volumes-- even stuff that is in the Early
English Texts series! via ILL.

And how many of us have sat and stewed when a researcher ILLs
something sight unseen because it might be helpful-- at a cost to the
institution of upwards of $40-- flipped through it, and returned it
without leaving the ILL office because it wasn't what they needed? And
our academic patrons.

Now, that doesn't mean the Google settlement isn't problematic. But
it's equally disingenuous to claim that the rights of future consumers
of a non-profit book digitization scheme are likely to be hurt. If the
Authors and Publishers'  organizations have their way, there will
never be a non-profit book digitization scheme; they have blocked it
so far, and in the future they would make it impossible for anyone,
non-profit or not, to get to these items; look what happened with the
Lexis-Nexis settlement. Rather than freelance authors getting paid for
their older material that was being digitized, their material simply
vanished from the searchable databases.