Googling for History

At the moment we use the verb to “Google” to mean search the internet for a specific topic (my father would hate this usage, since it puts the trademark of Google at risk, just like Kleenex and Scotch Tape…). In the future – “Googling” might instead mean gathering or even owning as much information as one can by means of digitization.

The biggest issues surrounding Google Books are those that deal with the protection of intellectual properties. Although we might appreciate the ability to now search through the texts of millions of books, we do need to worry about the fact that Google has been forging ahead with its digitization project without a great deal of respect for those who created the content. There are safeguards against users being able to access full texts and publishers do have the option to limit access to certain books. However, there is a great deal of market pressure placed on the publishers and authors to follow Google’s lead – being found easily on Google might just increase real sales of books. The long term investment for Google will come when the various books that it has digitized enter the public domain, at which time Google can lift its restrictions and allow or full browsing of the various books.  At that time Google will enter into an area that is already being pioneered by the Open Content Alliance, a network of volunteers and affiliated libraries who are working on digitizing as many public domain works as possible.

Personally, I find the quality of the product produced by the Open Content Alliance to be far superior to that of Google, which often times seems rushed – with missing pages and scans that are often off-center. What the Open Content Alliance lacks is an effective search engine – there is no Google plugin to spread up the search process here… Although you can easily find various authors and titles quite easily – Google brings up searches that include when authors are cited by others or works by related authors. Maybe the two organizations will be able to pull together in some fashion…

The largest advantage that these two organizations have over some other competing digital collections is that they are free to the general public. Unlike ProQuest, which bought digital licenses for most of the large newspapers of the world and charges enormous fees to search through them, Google and the OCA have been able to keep access open – one by means of a business model built on attracting as many eyes as possible to its content and another through the work of volunteers.

Last week, Google announced that it was going to also move into the area of newspaper digitization. Although Google will include content from the major newspapers, and thus compete head on with ProQuest, it is also going to partner with regional and local newspapers who would otherwise not have the ability to digitize their holdings. In many ways this is a boon for the local newspapers. Even thought they are “giving” their content to Google, they are gaining a valuable resource for their own business and exposing their newspapers to a much wider audience (they will also share in the advertizing revenue with Google).

Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post realized a few years ago that there was no money to be made in charging for access to its archives and have both opened up their own digital archives to the general public – earning more through the advertisements than they ever did through the fees that they charged.

Digital libraries are going to be a part of our future – hopefully they will never replace the brick and mortar libraries of today, but I do hope that we will find such collections as a means to deepen and broaden our own research endeavors.

5 Replies to “Googling for History”

  1. I had never really thought before about why Google has insisted on digitizing books that aren’t in the public domain. I just couldn’t figure out how they could make a profit. But your post really opened my eyes. I did not realize that Google had such a longterm strategy laid out for Google Books. I have to wonder though, if Google really will be around long enough, and focused on its digitization mission, to reap all of the benefits of digitizing these books long before they go into the public domain. I just the other day, read an article about the collapse of Merrell Lynch. I never imagined that such a huge corporation as that could collapse so quickly. It really drives home the volatility of a capitalist economy. Google is on top now, but it could collapse or be taken over just as quickly as Merrell Lynch did. I have much more faith in the longevity of the OCA, it is run by colleges and universities who tend to be more economically stable and who have a very personal stake in the OCA’s continued existence,

  2. Well, the business model of Google doesn’t mean that they need the whole book to be visible in order to make money. It gets its money by the advertisements that accompany the searching and viewing of the books.

    However, even if Google were to go under – the digital books that it has would be seen as an asset with financial value, which could be sold on to another entity. Thus, while Google might not exist – Google Books as an asset might continue on.

  3. I certainly hope you’re right. I’ve just taken too many classes on archival preservation to be confident about the longterm stability of any medium that isn’t vellum or stone.

  4. The “friability” of electronic resources is an issue– I don’t think anyone who has lost a paper or term project to some form of odd OS glitch would disagree. But even vellum or stone (or clay tablets, my favorite old-time medium) deteriorate over time. It’s just a matter of scale.

    (And, unless you’re writing for the Penn Sumerian Dictionary project, I don’t think the professors would appreciate a ten-page paper on pottery, actually on pottery…)

    We’ve got a corporate model, and a free-and-open model. Does anyone know if there’s a “lending-library” model out there? Perhaps some form of electronic copy-lock similar to that on DVDs, or a time-limited access on the files? And would that even be viable?

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