At the moment we use the verb to “Google” to mean search the internet for a specific topic (my father would hate this usage, since it puts the trademark of Google at risk, just like Kleenex and Scotch Tape…). In the future – “Googling” might instead mean gathering or even owning as much information as one can by means of digitization.
The biggest issues surrounding Google Books are those that deal with the protection of intellectual properties. Although we might appreciate the ability to now search through the texts of millions of books, we do need to worry about the fact that Google has been forging ahead with its digitization project without a great deal of respect for those who created the content. There are safeguards against users being able to access full texts and publishers do have the option to limit access to certain books. However, there is a great deal of market pressure placed on the publishers and authors to follow Google’s lead – being found easily on Google might just increase real sales of books. The long term investment for Google will come when the various books that it has digitized enter the public domain, at which time Google can lift its restrictions and allow or full browsing of the various books. At that time Google will enter into an area that is already being pioneered by the Open Content Alliance, a network of volunteers and affiliated libraries who are working on digitizing as many public domain works as possible.
Personally, I find the quality of the product produced by the Open Content Alliance to be far superior to that of Google, which often times seems rushed – with missing pages and scans that are often off-center. What the Open Content Alliance lacks is an effective search engine – there is no Google plugin to spread up the search process here… Although you can easily find various authors and titles quite easily – Google brings up searches that include when authors are cited by others or works by related authors. Maybe the two organizations will be able to pull together in some fashion…
The largest advantage that these two organizations have over some other competing digital collections is that they are free to the general public. Unlike ProQuest, which bought digital licenses for most of the large newspapers of the world and charges enormous fees to search through them, Google and the OCA have been able to keep access open – one by means of a business model built on attracting as many eyes as possible to its content and another through the work of volunteers.
Last week, Google announced that it was going to also move into the area of newspaper digitization. Although Google will include content from the major newspapers, and thus compete head on with ProQuest, it is also going to partner with regional and local newspapers who would otherwise not have the ability to digitize their holdings. In many ways this is a boon for the local newspapers. Even thought they are “giving” their content to Google, they are gaining a valuable resource for their own business and exposing their newspapers to a much wider audience (they will also share in the advertizing revenue with Google).
Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post realized a few years ago that there was no money to be made in charging for access to its archives and have both opened up their own digital archives to the general public – earning more through the advertisements than they ever did through the fees that they charged.
Digital libraries are going to be a part of our future – hopefully they will never replace the brick and mortar libraries of today, but I do hope that we will find such collections as a means to deepen and broaden our own research endeavors.