LibraryLinks Spring 2005

& Libraries

By John M. Meador, Jr.

In December 2004 Google, Inc. announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library to digitize library books and make them searchable online. Last week I attended the first joint presentation by representatives of these institutions seeking to clarify the extent of this project. Although bound by non-disclosure agreements, representatives of the “Google 5” acknowledged each had negotiated independently with Google and were unaware of the others’ participation until the press release. None of these institutions will receive monetary compensation from Google, only copies of the digital images and OCR files to achieve “preservation reformatting.” Also, it is believed that keyword searching of the scanned texts via Google Search will provide deeper access and discovery within each library’s owned content.

Harvard and The New York Public Library are beginning “pilot” projects with Google by allowing digitization of very few books, all of which are pre-1923 and therefore out of copyright protection. Oxford University’s Bodleian Library is permitting any number of pre-1920 books to be digitized. Stanford expects to begin digitizing books next fall. The University of Michigan began production in fall 2004 with no copyright constraints on its 8 million volumes except that special collections materials are excluded from the project.

It is anticipated that a Google Search retrieving copyrighted books will display only three lines of text to stay within fair use guidelines of the Copyright Law. This limitation will increase local and interlibrary loan pressure on existing print libraries owning copies of these titles. In this context, Google must be viewed as creating a means of complementing existing library catalogs to aid scholars in discovering new value among existing library collections.