Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

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Digital Libraries

Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

1/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Yes, Google is opening up whole new worlds for internet surfers and researchers everywhere-even before the model is ready.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE about Google's book digitization project. Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved-you'll find that Book Search (from the fifth most valuable company in America) is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude. It doesn't even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities.

Here's the magic: Type "sonoma" and "mission" into books.google.com and choose "Full view" to eliminate those books that haven't granted permission to be fully displayed or that are still in copyright because they were published post-1923. About 550 titles show up, almost all of which you can view in text format or as a PDF file. Perhaps the oldest reference that will appear is a volume titled An Overland Journey Round the World During the Years 1841 and 1842 by Sir George Simpson, governor-in-chief of The Hudson's Bay Company's territories. Google digitized the 1847 volume from the collection of the New York Public Library, as the bar code on the cover shows (along with a small portion of what looks to be a human arm, probably belonging to the person scanning that particular title).

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As a reader, you might consider the discovery of this long-lost tome a modern-day miracle, akin to stumbling on the bones of a previously unknown dinosaur while digging in your garden. And even though you never have to leave your keyboard to read the contents, you could click a link on the page, enter your ZIP code, and find the nearest library that has the book in its collection, in case you're the kind of person who likes to touch actual pages and take in the perfume of old book stock.

Somehow (although the details are mostly sketchy to those outside the company), thousands of books are working their way through the project every business day to join the millions of other publications already included in Book Search. But let's take a look at how Google is working with one of its partners-the University of California system-to keep the process humming along.