Quality of Google Book Search Is Questioned
-- Library Journal, 5/8/2007
How history will judge Google Book Search remains an open question, but one historian has offered a pretty harsh assessment of its current efforts. "Over the past three months, I spent a fair amount of time on [Google Book Search] as part of a research project on the early history of the profession," historian and assistant director for research and publications for the American Historical Association, (AHA) Robert Townsend, writes on the AHA blog. "And from a researcher's point of view, I have to say the results were deeply disconcerting."
His main concern: Google's haste, which seems to be outstripping not only the company's ability to control quality but also the technology needed to "extract" the information being scanned. Townsend argues that Google Book Search falls short in three, broad categories: poor scanning, poor metadata, and peculiar copyright restrictions.
Not all commenters on Townsend's post seem worried, with some, in a lively dialogue, defending Google's efforts to push things along. Townsend notes the program's lofty goals hold promise and says he can understand Google's financial motivation to keep "scooping up" market share. "But I am not sure why the rest of us should share the company's sense of haste," he writes. "Shouldn't we ponder the costs to history if the real libraries take error-filled digital versions of particular books and bury the originals in a dark archive, or the dumpster?"
