UC Partners with Google Library Project
The University of California has now become the latest and largest partner to lend their collection to the Google Books Library Project; joining Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford, and yes… Stanfurd. This will make the over 34 million volumes held in the University’s 100+ libraries easily accessible and searchable and make plagiarism… er… research much easier. In addition to that, a digitized collection creates an extra backup for the many rare volumes found in the UC libraries. According to Brian Schottlaender, university librarian at UCSD (from the UC website):
“Tens of thousands of volumes entrusted to our care are printed on acid-rich paper and are crumbling into dust. In fact, all our holdings are chronically at risk, residing as they do in seismically unstable California.”
“Anyone who doubts the potential impact that natural disaster can have, need look no further than the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on our sister libraries in Louisiana and Mississippi. Digital copies tucked away safely in a preservation archive would have saved those libraries — and indeed, the world — from irrecoverable loss.”
While that may be a little dramatized, especially given the great losses other than library collections as a result of natural disasters, it does still seem to be a big plus for the University to move its library system into an additional media.
But of course, nothing can get done around here without some form of controversy and criticism. This time it’s actually not coming from the Berkeley City Council, though I’m sure Gordon Wozniak will speak out against whatever grave injustices this program will create.
So far, the problems dealing with the project are mostly centered around copyright infringement. The “solution” found by the University’s other digital library project, the Open Content Alliance, was to skip over copyrighted materials in the collections but this leads to a massive shortfall in the amount of available information. Google’s solution is instead to provide the minimal relevant information to search queries but even this plan has come under fire.
Additionally there comes the price tag. From the LA Times:
The university would have to initially invest between $1 million and $5 million for computer storage and spend upward of $700,000 a year for such costs as staff salaries for moving books from shelves before scanning, officials said.
However this is hardly a large sum compared to many of the expenditures made by the University, and the long-term financial impact on the University could be a positive one depending on the amount of use the digital library gets.
Plaigiarism, hmmm. I guess that is a valid point considering they are scanning books. However, I would note that if you look further into the Book Search program that Google is running, a person would not be able to access and read the full text of a volume. It’s a search function that will let people pull up exceprts or quotes, not whole books.
Comment by N — August 11, 2006 @ 12:14 pm