Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

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Digital Libraries

Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

1/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

In fact, when UC signed its contract with Google in July 2006, UC agreed to provide no less than 2.5 million volumes to the digitization effort over the course of the agreement's six-year period. That's just under 420,000 books a year, or less than a tenth of the annual circulation of materials throughout the UC library system, which circulated 4.7 million items in the 2005-2006 academic year. According to the contract, after an initial ramp-up of a couple of months of delivering 600 books per day, UC was obligated to crank up delivery to 3,000 per day. And that, says Robin Chandler, former director of data acquisitions for UC's California Digital Library (CDL), is exactly what UC's goal has been. (This month, Chandler is moving to a digital library position at the University of California-San Diego.)

Chandler, who held the CDL role for seven years, worked with a multitude of libraries inside and outside the UC system, to help guide their digitization efforts. That includes Calisphere, a public gateway to 150,000 digitized items (including diaries, photographs, political cartoons, and other cultural artifacts representing the history and culture of California), as well as the Online Archive of California, which brings together historical materials from a number of California institutions including museums, historical societies, and archives.

Do Authors Want to Be Digitized?

GREG SCHULZ, FOUNDER OF AND SENIOR ANALYST for The StorageIO Group-and interviewed for this article-is also the author of the book, Resilient Storage Networks (Digital Press, 2004). It doesn't bother him in the least that Google Book Search might scan his entire book and make pieces of it available.

"I'm fine with that," he declares. "If it allows my work to be more widely known so that people buy the book or engage in other related services, I'm all for it. I'll gladly give up some book sales if it leads to something else."

The sticking point? When Google or other book-search projects "start leveraging the work, or doing things with it. Then it gets into another dimension," says Schulz, pointing to the recent Writers Guild strike. "At the center of that is: How do new media efforts affect royalties? What happens?" In other words, a green light for now doesn't mean a green light forever.

"I've worked on a lot of projects that have had complex partnership [components]," she says. "So [CDL] asked me to work on the mass digitization activities." That mandate surfaced two years ago, first with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort that's part of the Internet Archive project; then with Microsoft as part of its Windows Live Book Search; and most recently with Google Book Search. Acting as the program liaison for those projects, she says, consumed about 75 to 80 percent of her time at CDL.