[Sca-cooks] NYTimes.com Article: Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database

Tue Dec 14 08:21:54 PST 2004

Sorry to those getting this several times  but it was too good to miss.

AEllin

> 
> Wow... the information coming available to the unaffiliated scholar without the resources to travel to these libraries...
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
> 
> December 14, 2004
>  By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet
> search service, plans to announce an agreement today with
> some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford
> University to begin converting their holdings into digital
> files that would be freely searchable over the Web. 
> 
> It may be only a step on a long road toward the
> long-predicted global virtual library. But the
> collaboration of Google and research institutions that also
> include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and
> the New York Public Library is a major stride in an
> ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is
> to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic,
> body of material and create a digital card catalog and
> searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers
> and special collections. 
> 
> Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer
> - has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced
> today while also adding its own technical abilities to the
> task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands of pages
> a day at each library. 
> 
> Although Google executives declined to comment on its
> technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved
> estimate the figure at $10 for each of the more than 15
> million books and other documents covered in the
> agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could
> take at least a decade. 
> 
> Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the pacts
> are almost certain to touch off a race with other major
> Internet search providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo.
> Like Google, they might seek the right to offer online
> access to library materials in return for selling
> advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help
> in digitizing their collections for their own institutional
> uses. 
> 
> "Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be
> digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the
> Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries
> today," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University's head
> librarian. 
> 
> The Google effort and others like it that are already under
> way, including projects by the Library of Congress to put
> selections of its best holdings online, are part of a trend
> to potentially democratize access to information that has
> long been available to only small, select groups of
> students and scholars. 
> 
> Last night the Library of Congress and a group of
> international libraries from the United States, Canada,
> Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a plan to create
> a publicly available digital archive of one million books
> on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000
> volumes online by next April. 
> 
> "Having the great libraries at your fingertips allows us to
> build on and create great works based on the work of
> others," said Brewster Kahle, founder and president of the
> Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library
> that is also trying to digitize existing print information.
> 
> 
> The agreements to be announced today will allow Google to
> publish the full text of only those library books old
> enough to no longer be under copyright. For copyrighted
> works, Google would scan in the entire text, but make only
> short excerpts available online. 
> 
> Each agreement with a library is slightly different. Google
> plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in
> Stanford's collection and the seven million at Michigan.
> The Harvard project will initially be limited to only about
> 40,000 volumes. The scanning at Bodleian Library at Oxford
> will be limited to an unspecified number of books published
> before 1900, while the New York Public Library project will
> involve fragile material not under copyright that library
> officials said would be of interest primarily to scholars. 
> 
> The trend toward online libraries and virtual card
> catalogs is one that already has book publishers scrambling
> to respond. 
> 
> At least a dozen major publishing companies, including some
> of the country's biggest producers of nonfiction books -
> the primary target for the online text-search efforts -
> have already entered ventures with Google and Amazon that
> allow users to search the text of copyrighted books online
> and read excerpts. 
> 
> Publishers including HarperCollins, the Penguin Group,
> Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic have signed up for both the
> Google and Amazon programs. The largest American trade
> publisher, Random House, participates in Amazon's program
> but is still negotiating with Google, which calls its
> program Google Print. 
> 
> The Amazon and Google programs work by restricting the
> access of users to only a few pages of a copyrighted book
> during each search, offering enough to help them decide
> whether the book meets their requirements enough to justify
> ordering the print version. Those features restrict a
> user's ability to copy, cut or print the copyrighted
> material, while limiting on-screen reading to a few pages
> at a time. Books still under copyright at the libraries
> involved in Google's new project are likely to be protected
> by similar restrictions. 
> 
> The challenge for publishers in coming years will be to
> continue to have libraries serve as major influential
> buyers of their books, without letting the newly vast
> digital public reading rooms undermine the companies'
> ability to make money commissioning and publishing authors'
> work. 
> 
>>From the earliest days of the printing press, book
> publishers were wary of the development of libraries at
> all. In many instances, they opposed the idea of a central
> facility offering free access to books that people would
> otherwise be compelled to buy. 
> 
> But as libraries developed and publishers became aware that
> they could be among their best customers, that opposition
> faded. Now publishers aggressively court librarians with
> advance copies of books, seeking positive reviews of books
> in library journals and otherwise trying to influence the
> opinion of the people who influence the reading habits of
> millions. Some of that promotional impulse may translate to
> the online world, publishing executives say. 
> 
> But at least initially, the search services are likely to
> be most useful to publishers whose nonfiction backlists, or
> catalogs of previously published titles, are of interest to
> scholars but do not sell regularly enough to be carried in
> large quantities in retail stores, said David Steinberger,
> the president and chief executive the Perseus Books Group,
> which publishes mostly nonfiction books under the Basic
> Books, PublicAffairs, Da Capo and other imprints. 
> 
> Based on his experiences with Amazon's and Google's
> commercial search services so far, Mr. Steinberger said, "I
> think there is minimal risk, or virtually no risk, of
> copyrighted material being misused." But he said he would
> object to a library's providing copyrighted material online
> without a license. "If you're talking about the
> instantaneous, free distribution of books, I think that
> would represent a problem," Mr. Steinberger said. 
> 
> For their part, libraries themselves will have to rethink
> their central missions as storehouses of printed, indexed
> material. 
> 
> "Our world is about to change in a big, big way," said
> Daniel Greenstein, university librarian for the California
> Digital Library of the University of California, which is a
> project to organize and retain existing digital materials. 
> 
> Instead of expending considerable time and money to
> managing their collections of printed materials, Mr.
> Greenstein said, libraries in the future can devote more
> energy to gathering information and making it accessible -
> and more easily manageable - online. 
> 
> But Paul LeClerc, the president and chief executive of the
> New York Public Library, sees Web access as an expansion of
> libraries' reach, not a replacement for physical
> collections. "Librarians will add a new dimension to their
> work," Mr. LeClerc said. "They will not abandon their
> mission of collecting printed material and keeping them for
> decades and even centuries." 
> 
> Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have long
> vowed to make all of the world's information accessible to
> anyone with a Web browser. The agreements to be announced
> today will put them a few steps closer to that goal - at
> least in terms of the English-language portion of the
> world's information. Mr. Page said yesterday that the
> project traced to the roots of Google, which he and Mr.
> Brin founded in 1998 after taking a leave from a graduate
> computer science program at Stanford where they worked on a
> "digital libraries" project. "What we first discussed at
> Stanford is now becoming practical," Mr. Page said. 
> 
> At Stanford, Google hopes to be able to scan 50,000 pages a
> day within the month, eventually doubling that rate,
> according to a person involved in the project. 
> 
> The Google plan calls for making the library materials
> available as part of Google's regular Web service, which
> currently has an estimated eight billion Web pages in its
> database and tens of millions of users a day. As with the
> other information on its service, Google will sell
> advertising to generate revenue from its library material.
> (In it existing Google Print program, the company shares
> advertising revenue with the participating book
> publishers.) 
> 
> Each library, meanwhile, will receive its own copy of the
> digital database created from that institution's holdings,
> which the library can make available through its own Web
> site if it chooses. 
> 
> Harvard officials said they would be happy to use the
> Internet to share their collections widely. "We have always
> thought of our libraries at Harvard as being a global
> resource," said Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard. 
> 
> At least initially, Google's digitizing task will be labor
> intensive, with people placing the books and documents on
> sophisticated scanners whose high-resolution cameras
> capture an image of each page and convert it to a digital
> file. 
> 
> Google, whose corporate campus in Mountain View, Calif., is
> just a few miles from Stanford, plans to transport books to
> a copying center it has established at its headquarters.
> There the books will be scanned and then returned to the
> Stanford libraries. Google plans to set up remote scanning
> operations at both Michigan and Harvard. 
> 
> The company refused to comment on the technology that it
> was using to digitize books, except to say that it was
> nondestructive. But according to a person who has been
> briefed on the project, Google's technology is more
> labor-intensive than systems that are already commercially
> available. 
> 
> Two small start-up companies, 4DigitalBooks of St. Aubin,
> Switzerland, and Kirtas Technologies of Victor, N.Y., are
> selling systems that automatically turn pages to capture
> images. 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?ex=1104038806&ei=1&en=6f0f9736dfe91953
> 
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