Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the open web democratized access to facts, figures, popular articles and
other casual research and ready-reference materials, access to more
specialized content was still enjoyed only by those who could either
afford to buy it themselves (an extremely rare few) or those who had
access to extensive public libraries or academic research collections.
Large collections of even relatively affordable documents, such as
literary works or popular magazines, required huge amounts of storage
space and significant organizational skill in order to make them
accessible. As materials moved online and required less space and less
externally imposed organization, they were still very expensive in the
aggregate, and library budgets remained a crucial tool in making the
materials available to those who needed access.
Then Google struck again. In late 2004 the company announced
plans to digitize, on a massive scale, the full content of books from major
research libraries throughout the Western world. Because of copyright
restrictions, Google would not be able to make the complete contents of
every book freely available to all - however, it did plan to make the
contents of each book
fully searchable
by all, and excerpts available,
subject to copyright limitations. This it proceeded to do, scanning and
digitizing massive amounts of content from the libraries of Harvard,
Princeton and Oxford universities, and the universities of Michigan,
California and Virginia, among many others in an increasingly
international and diverse group. By the end of 2008, over seven million
titles - many of them previously available only to the very privileged few
with access to these top-notch research collections - had been opened up
to the search queries of anyone with access to the internet, and a
significant minority of the titles in question were freely available to the
public for online reading or printing (Drummond, 2008).
Libraries' response to the Google Book Search (GBS) juggernaut has,
generally, been that of an ostrich that pauses, as it whistles past the
graveyard, only long enough to stick its head in the sand. It is as if a
manufacturer of carriages had responded to the development of the
automobile by snorting that it may be faster, more economical and
more comfortable than the horse-drawn carriage, but it still doesn't fly,
does it? One of the first criticisms of GBS was that while it makes
millions and millions of books searchable, most of those books are
available for only very limited downloading, due to copyright
restrictions. While this is true, it ignores a very important fact about
