See below on state of play with Michigan's Google-scanned
books
and Google's own service. As the article points out,
books.google.com now allows download of *some*
long-in-public-domain books. A couple of observations from
practice there:
1. The books now in Google from public domain scanning at
the
big libraries are very erratically present. Individual
volumes
of multi-volume sets appear, but not the complete set.
Hence
Thomas Bowdler's edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall
"for the
use of families and young persons" is only partly
there, likewise
a still-used "History of Classical Scholarship"
by J.E. Sandys --
only one of three volumes.
2. It is possible that the complete sets are in fact there,
but
the underlying frustration in my first point is that the
quality
of the metadata is poor. You can't in fact look for a set,
or
for a specific volume of a set. The search and its results
resemble those of an Amazon search engine, not a library
catalogue. If multiple editions of the same thing are
there, you
will have to click on each, look at pub. data and table of
contents, and even then may have trouble being sure you see
what
you see.
3. At this point it is wildly impossible to predict what
will be
there and what won't. Not just a question of sets, but if
you
search by author, the impression given is that of a
well-stocked
antiquarian book store -- erratic, odd lots, famous work of
X
missing but minor works present, etc.
Summary impression (not surprising): Google is not a
library,
and libraries still add substantial value.
Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.
______________
http://chro
nicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.co
m/free/2006/08/2006083101t.htm
Thursday, August 31, 2006
U. of Michigan Adds Books Digitized by Google to Online
Catalog,
but Limits Use of Some
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
As it works with Google to scan nearly all the books on its
shelves, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has decided
not
to make full-text versions of copyrighted books available
online,
even to on-campus users.
The university has upgraded its online card catalog to
include
full-text electronic copies of books that have been scanned
as
part of its controversial partnership with Google.
Users will be able to read the complete text of
out-of-copyright
works online. For those volumes, the university is making
high-resolution images available for each page. That could
be
particularly valuable for researchers studying any material
in
the margins of the scanned books.
If a scanned book is still under copyright, though, users
will
not be able to read the digital copy. Instead, the
card-catalog
system will return a list of the pages that contain the
search
term and how many times the term appears on those pages. The
reader will be directed to the library's stacks for the
printed
book.
Some observers had wondered whether the university might
make
full-text versions of copyrighted books available at
on-campus
computers, but Michigan officials ruled out that option
early on.
"We don't believe that fair use allows us to make
that kind of
access available to our user community," said John P.
Wilkin, an
associate university librarian.
The fair-use doctrine allows educators to reproduce a
limited
portion of copyrighted material for classroom use without
seeking
permission or paying royalties. But how far that principle
applies to putting copyrighted materials online is an area
of
dispute.
Publishers have objected to Google's project, in which it
is
working with several major university libraries to scan
books to
add to its index. Although Google is making only short
excerpts
of copyrighted books available to users, publishers argue
that no
one can make digital copies of books -- even just for
indexing --
without express permission from the copyright holders.
Michigan's contract with Google stipulates that a digital
copy of
each book scanned by the search-engine company will be given
to
the university for its own use. The university calls its
digitized copies "MBooks."
Copy and Paste
A key difference between Michigan's digital books and
Google's
versions of the same texts is that Michigan makes it
possible to
copy and paste material from the pages. The pages offered on
Google Book Search are image files that do not allow easy
copying
and pasting.
Last week Google added a new feature to its service,
allowing
users to download copies of some public-domain books to
their
personal computers. But those downloadable books, too, do
not
allow easy cutting and pasting.
The ability to easily lift blocks of texts for quotation
would be
a boon to scholars who are writing papers, but it could also
make
plagiarism easier. Mr. Wilkin said Michigan officials were
not
worried that their new service might somehow aggravate that
problem. "Most of the resources we provide to students
also make
this sort of thing possible," he said.
The university's MBooks service was designed with academics
in
mind, he said. For one thing, the campus library is careful
to
make sure that all links to the digital texts remain
constant, so
that scholars can cite the digital books in their papers
without
worrying that the links will become obsolete.
Steven J. Bell, director of the library at Philadelphia
University, said Michigan's new digital-book service could
spur
more scholars around the world to use interlibrary loans to
request single pages or groups of pages from books held by
Michigan. After all, if scholars can consult Michigan's
online
catalog to find out which pages contain the terms they are
looking for, they might request just those pages rather than
the
entire book.
"It might really have some implications for the whole
resource-sharing" aspect of library services, said Mr.
Bell. "It
really does simplify my ability to tap into that content
from
afar."
copyright 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education
|