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Opinion
The Books Google Could Open
9/25/2006
THE NATION’S COLLEGES and universities should support Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online. It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country.
The rapid annual increase in the number of new books and journals, coupled with far-reaching technological innovations, is changing relations between academia and the publishing industry. In the recent past, college and university libraries collaborated with publishers in creating online collections of selected published works. But now many in the publishing industry are opposing Book Search, the new digital catalog of published works created by Google, even as it is being hailed by many librarians as a way to expand access to millions of published works.
Many are opposing Google’s Book Search even as it is being hailed as a way to expand access to millions of published works.Only a fraction of books published today is printed in editions of more than a few thousand copies. And the great works of even the recent past are quickly passing into obscurity. Google has joined with major libraries to make it possible for all titles to remain accessible to users.
Book Search is a Herculean undertaking, digitizing both new and old works housed in some of the world’s top libraries—Stanford [CA], Harvard [MA], the University of Michigan, the University of California system, the New York Public Library, and Oxford [UK]—and rendering them searchable through Google’s powerful website. Book Search d'es not permit users to read entire copyrighted works on screen; it simply makes those works searchable through keywords, quickly and at no cost, and allows readers to view several lines from the book. Users can look at an entire page from any book not under copyright protection.
This powerful new tool will make less well-known written works or hard-to-find research materials more accessible to students, teachers, and others around the world. Geography will not hinder a student’s quest to find relevant material. Libraries can help to revive interest in underused books. And sales of books will likely increase as a result.
Book Search comes at a time when college and university libraries are hard-pressed to keep up with the publishing and technology revolutions. Budgets are stretched, and libraries must now specialize and rely on interlibrary loan for books in other subjects.
Student and faculty research also has been limited by what is on the shelves of the campus library. A student can identify a book through an online library catalog, but the book’s content remains unknown. It must then be shipped —an expense that may not be worthwhile if the book isn’t what was expected.
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