Lemming post
I'm sure everyone else in the library world is talking about it, so I may as well link to the Google-sized scanning project announced this morning.
The NYT article mentions that publishers have learned to love librarians' buying power. With this new program, does it mean that librarians at only five institutions will now have all the power? I mean, if everything from these five libraries is discoverable online, does anyone else really need to buy the books?
This is, of course, an obvious fallacy. Five copies couldn't endlessly circulate through ILL offices throughout the country. (Besides, I don't think NYPL lends to its own patrons, let along ILLs.) I think there are more interesting points to ponder:
I'm sure there are other things to ponder, but I've got to get to work.
The NYT article mentions that publishers have learned to love librarians' buying power. With this new program, does it mean that librarians at only five institutions will now have all the power? I mean, if everything from these five libraries is discoverable online, does anyone else really need to buy the books?
This is, of course, an obvious fallacy. Five copies couldn't endlessly circulate through ILL offices throughout the country. (Besides, I don't think NYPL lends to its own patrons, let along ILLs.) I think there are more interesting points to ponder:
- Will the libraries involved start selling access to their huge full-text holdings?
- Notice how all of the institutions are private? (I know Michigan is public, but at $4000 / semester for in-state students, how public is it?)
- Will Google?
- There is some discussion of copyright issues (you'll only be able to see a few pages of the text for works still in copyright), but will you be able to get full-text on the campusses?
I'm sure there are other things to ponder, but I've got to get to work.
2 Comments:
At 9:45 PM ,
Deepfry said...
additional point to ponder:
+does getting back 456,938 results in a google search really do you better than the 350,193 you were getting before all these books were full-text searchable?
At 4:59 PM ,
charper said...
Ah, yes. Pondering.
I can't imagine libraries could try to sell their access, but who knows. I REALLY can't imagine that Google could do so, except in partnership with the libraries. I would guess that the full text won't be available on or off campus for copyrighted materials. I would hope that this would be seen as another mechanism for FINDING books, not necessarily reading them. People still like to read books that are made of paper. I would love to see Google, these institutions & OCLC find some way to connect this with the Open WorldCat project: search the full text as part of the index, retrieve a book because it mentions your search string, see that partial full text is available from NYPL, but also be able to locate copies in you're area. How cool would that be?
Also, the usefullness of 456,938 hits versus 350,193 all depends on where the additional 106,745 fall in Google's ranking algorithm. If one of them is now suddenly the first result, then I think it probably does make a difference. If they're all in the 500-800th pages of results, then it makes no difference at all.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home