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Digital Libraries
Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
1/1/2008
What form would that take for the person doing the search? According to Clancy, Google features to make book links possible have just begun to surface. One tool introduced (in the interface for books that are under no copyright restrictions) allows the reader to capture a section of a full page and copy it as text or an image to a Blogger page or Notebook, both Google services. "If there's a particular quote you like, you can go ahead and create a clipping of that quote, stick it on your blog and say something like, ‘This is where Abe Lincoln first asserted his desire to free the slaves.'"
Eventually, he says, authors will be able to represent "not just the conclusions and assertions they're making, but also the data upon which they base those assertions." He describes somebody reading David McCullough's 1776 (Simon & Schuster, 2005) being able to click through to primary sources such as George Washington's diary or the letters written by John Adams. But, "Now, I've gone beyond what Google is going to do," Clancy says. "As you open up all this content, these are research challenges for libraries, for the research communities, and for Google to say: How does this change scholarship?" Clancy envisions a day when users of online catalogs such as Melvyl (UC's OPAC) can find the record of a book and immediately link over to the content, whether that material is hosted by Google, UC, or some other institution with which the university has affiliated itself.
Still, without the profit-driven motives of a company such as Google (or Microsoft, for that matter), UC would never have had the funds to scan its materials on such a broad scale, maintains Chandler. "Strategically, it's really an important opportunity to take advantage of." Ultimately, she says, "We utilize the environment in which our faculty and students are working, and more and more obviously, it's digital."
When it comes down to it, then, this brave new world of book search probably needs to be understood as Book Search 1.0. And maybe participants should not get so hung up on quality that they obstruct the flow of an astounding amount of information. Right now, say many, the conveyor belt is running and the goal is to manage quantity, knowing that with time the rest of what's important will follow. Certainly, there's little doubt that in five years or so, Book Search as defined by Google will be very different. The lawsuits will have been resolved, the copyright issues sorted out, the standards settled, the technologies more broadly available, the integration more transparent.
"One thing we've learned," says Clancy: "We don't try to anticipate how people will make use of something. We're just at beginning of the marathon."
::WEBEXTRAS ::
The CIC's Richard Ekman weighs
in on the Google Book Search controversy:
www.campustechnology.com/articles/41199.
Dian Schaffhauser covers technology and business for various print and online publications.
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
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