Libraries already act like Google in many ways. Or I should say instead, Google acts like libraries. It is the mission of both to organize the world's information, to make it openly accessible, to find and present the most authoritative (by many definitions) sources, to instill an ethic of information use in the public, to act as a platform for communities of information, to encourage creation.
So how could libraries, in turn, think like Google? Some libraries act as platforms for community content creation (one of my first efforts in hyperlocal community journalism, GoSkokie.net, made with the Medill School of Journalism, is now run by the library). In how many ways could a library act as a platform for the community to inform itself by providing tools and training for content creation?
How can libraries collect the wisdom of the crowd that is their communities (e.g., creating collaborative town wikis and maps made by the community)? Librarians and their expert patrons could curate the web and create topic pages that would rise in Google search as valuable resources for the world (if your library is in Florida, it could maintain the best collections of sources for information on manatees or sunburns). What I'd really like to do is brainstorm this question with your readers on my blog: How could they be Googlier?
This lengthy New York Times Magazine article discusses mass scanning projects and their impacts in many areas: linking, tagging, and accessibility, among others. Ultimately, author Kevin Kelly imagines that all digitized books will be linked together as on universal book. He discusses the impact of copyright law on existing works and the inevitable out of print "orphans," and Google's plan to scan all the orphans and allow snippets to be accessed under the fair use doctrine. This assumption by Google that it can scan first and find copyright owners later results in a lawsuit that the author describes as a "clash of business models." Business models based on copies are obsolete as business models based on value and searchability take their places.
This is a lengthy 2005 article on Google's digital book preservation initiative. Google has undertaken an ambitious project, and the author details how exactly the books digitally preserved, how they are cataloged, and how ancient handwritten books are transformed into searchable text. At the time this article was written, it was still unknown as to what Google planned on doing with all the books it digitized and various options are discussed. Policy issues are touched on very lightly, other than the books added to the digital collection are largely those which are not protected by copyright law.
"Organizing the OCA: Learning faceted subjects from a library of digital books. David Mimno and Andrew McCallum. Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2007, Vancouver, BC, Canada. PDF
The Open Content Alliance is one of several large-scale digitization projects currently producing huge numbers of digital books. Statistical topic models are a natural choice for organizing and describing such large text corpora, but scalability becomes a problem when we are dealing with multi-billion word corpora. This paper presents a new method for topic modeling, DCM-LDA. In this model, we train an independent topic model for every book, using pages as "documents". We then gather the topics discovered, cluster them, and then fit a Dirichlet prior for each topic cluster. Finally, we retrain the individual book topic models using these new shared topics. "
via Dan Cohen
working on virtual shelves project, using information within texts (OCA) as organizing principle instead of LCSH; former Perseus programmer
This link leads to an 2000 article by Marlene Manoff called "Hybridity, Mutability, Multiplicity: Theorizing Electronic Library Collections." Much of the article discusses bibliographic control at a time when the internet was still a fairly new environment. Ms. Manoff discusses the changes that were occurring around 1998 - 2000, and many of these cataloging issues are still around today.
This summary paragraph is quoted directly from the article: "This Review is structured as follows (see also Figure 1): the section Digital Libraries, DOIs, and URIs starts by looking at the range of information in digital libraries, and how resources are identified using URIs on the Web. In the section Problems with Digital Libraries, we consider a fairly standard workflow that serves to highlight some problems with using these libraries. The following section, Some Tools for Defrosting Libraries, examines what Web-based tools are currently available to defrost the digital library and how they are making libraries more personal, sociable, and integrated places. Finally, the section A Future with Warmer Libraries looks at the obstacles to future progress, recommends some best practices for digital publishing, and draws conclusions."
This page features the results of the collaboration between Google and the LOC to digitize Congressional hearings. I tried the Immigration collection, and found it easy to download and search the .pdf document. This is a great resource for researchers.
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