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Digital Libraries
Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
1/1/2008
"When it first started, the technical challenge was simply building a scanning device that worked," Clancy says. "The next technical challenge was being able to run this scanning process at scale. We would have been quite happy to use commercial scanning technologies if they were adequate to scale to this. We only built our own scanning process because that was the way to make this project achievable for Google."
Book Search Today: A Researcher's View
SUSAN FARMA IS WORKING ON her master of arts in humanities at California State University-Dominguez Hills. Because she's working full-time as an application manager for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Farma was thrilled when she learned about Google Book Search. "Anything that saved time I considered a boon," she says. "But it has not provided the help in research that I hoped." Her complaint: "I find it has severe limitations. For instance, if the book is not in the public domain, the snippet view only shows you the word you searched for and a few words around that word. There is no way to tell from the half a sentence that [Google shows you], whether buying or borrowing the book in question would be able to advance your thesis." In addition, says Farma, "books in the public domain online are few and far between yet, and most of them are extremely old. [Book Search] works great for classics in, say, literature, but not for individual subjects that you may be interested in researching."
Let's look at what Google may have rejected as inadequate to do the job: The APT BookScan 2400 Gold, the fastest commercial offering from digitization vendor Kirtas Technologies, scans books at a rate of 2,400 pages per hour. The product costs between $100,000 and $175,000 and includes two cameras, each pointing downward at a 45-degree angle. In a video on the company's website, a worker is shown placing a book in a cradle and making adjustments for its size. As both pages are whipped through the scanning simultaneously, a robotic arm that looks like a waffle iron adheres to a page and flips it for the next photo shoot to occur.
The question is: Is that fast enough to keep up with Google's demands? At an average size of 300 pages per book (a count cited by UC's Chandler), Kirtas equipment is capable of scanning eight books an hour or 64 books in an eighthour workshift. If scanning operations were running around the clock and staffers never took breaks, called in sick, or experienced equipment outages, the tally would reach 1,344 books a week per machine. Keeping up the pace of those 15,000 books a week fed by UC would require 12 of the Golds. Yet apparently, Google is using something else it considers superior.
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