Group items tagged

This article mostly covers the process of mass digitization. One of the recommendations at the end of the article states, " A "digital lending right" should be created to provide universal access to all out-of-print works, through collaboration between national governments and creative communities. This would remove a barrier to the mass democratization of information access and make a contribution to the survival of some threatened languages."

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

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.

"The prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university-based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness."

Robert Chavez, Gregory Crane, Anne Sauer, Alison Babeu, Adrian Packel and Gabriel Weaver Abstract This paper provides an overview of the collaboration between the Perseus Project and the Digital Collection and Archives (DCA) at Tufts University in moving the collections of the Perseus Project into the DCA's Fedora based repository as well as a listing of potential services necessary to support a successful institutional repository.

This article examines what it will take to make digital respositories successful in the future. The authors of this article predict that value-added services such as linking documents to related or source documents will popularize digital repositories. The authors imagine partnerships between different libraries and collections will also strengthen the future of digital repositories.

Quoted directly from the introductory paragraphs of the article, "This article offers some perspectives on GPLP in light of what is known about library print book collections in general, and those of the Google 5 in particular, from information in OCLC's WorldCat bibliographic database and holdings file. Questions addressed include: * Coverage: What proportion of the system-wide print book collection will GPLP potentially cover? What is the degree of holdings overlap across the print book collections of the five participating libraries? * Language: What is the distribution of languages associated with the print books held by the GPLP libraries? Which languages are predominant? * Copyright: What proportion of the GPLP libraries' print book holdings are out of copyright? * Works: How many distinct works are represented in the holdings of the GPLP libraries? How does a focus on works impact coverage and holdings overlap? * Convergence: What are the effects on coverage of using a different set of five libraries? What are the effects of adding the holdings of additional libraries to those of the GPLP libraries, and how do these effects vary by library type?"

critique of Google Books

I think this can be deleted, but tagged it just in case. It seems to me to mostly be a critique against Google's digitization project, pointing out better ways to digitize books.

This is the Website for the Universal Digital Library project at Carnegie Mellon University. The "Copyright Policy" page clearly spells out how the project adheres to the existing copyright law, and provides information for authors who either want to add their work to the project or have it removed. It is interesting that this project allows for self-publication.

U Mich president's talk on the benefits of participating in Google Books

A pro-Google-Book Search speech, given by the head librarian at the University of Michigan.

2006 article on Google Books from library perspective. Asks "How will the librarians at participating Google Book Search libraries use their copies of the digitized books, commonly referred to as the library digital copy, the copy that Google gave to them in return for their participation in the Book Search project?"

Lots of statistics on the print-to-digital transition, particularly the types of books being digitized (largely English language). This article looks at taking a "system wide view of library collections" to evaluate digital resources for collection development.

Kahle, Prelinger et al

The Future of Libraries