Google Plan Mostly Hailed by Librarians

-- Library Journal, 12/20/2004

Librarians last week mostly hailed an ambitious Google program to digitize as many as 15 million books from five prestigious libraries, while acknowledging questions as to how the plan will affect the future of libraries and publishers. Dennis Dillon, associate university librarian at the University of Texas at Austin, said he was "stunned" by Google's announcement, and called their ambitious program "brilliant." "A great leap forward," commented Michael Keller, Stanford University's head librarian--one of Google's partners in the project--noting that online book content has lagged far behind journal content. Keller said the Google arrangement catapulted Stanford's effective digital output from the "boutique scale to the truly industrial." Stanford and Michigan University intend to offer their entire book collections for Google to scan, but other partners are more cautious. Harvard and Oxford universities are offering just a portion of their collections and the New York Public Library is contributing only rare materials. James Neal, Columbia University librarian, called the program "transformational.

Some, of course, raised questions. "I believe, however, that massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms," wrote Michael Gorman, dean of library services at Fresno State University (and American Library Association president-elect), in the Los Angeles Times. Karen Coyle, a digital library consultant formerly with the California Digital Library, also had questions. "To me, one of the more interesting phenomena of the digital age is that we've basically got stuff in the public domain and scientific pre-prints but everything between 1926 and like 1994 is mostly unavailable," Coyle said. "What will happen when someone goes to Google and types in 'U.S. history'? Will they get a web site? An out of print book?" While acknowledging the positive aspects of Google's program, she said it also "scares me...because no one has looked at what we are doing to the growth of knowledge."