Google recently announced that it would be scaling back its massive digitization effort of books at academic libraries. As mentioned in my previous post, academic texts have yet to reach the scope of personal reading books in terms of their availability in electronic format. While Google's work digitizing more than 20 millions books will certainly help bring academic texts up to speed, I have to wonder, was the effort worth it? When you think about how many times individual library books are used by the average student, you have to wonder if the trouble of scanning some of the rarest books (used by a random doctoral student every, say, 3 years) was worth the time and effort of the project. I wonder how much research Google did into the libraries before it started pulling books off of the shelves. Are the selected texts the ones that are most frequently taken out of the library or were they just randomly selected books? Some university libraries are now left with many texts un-scanned and without the manpower or money to complete the project.
In the grand scheme of things, I can see the benefit of having more information widely available to a greater number of people, but I worry that students who formerly came to their university library for books, might now not see as much validity if they can get the texts they need online. In that regard, as efforts such as Google's continue, I think there will be increased pressure on libraries to become more social spaces that offer more than just books. Most already offer a wide variety of programs, but marketing of those programs will need to be more prevalent as technological strides are made.
***It will also be interesting to see how things turn out with the lawsuits against both Google and the university libraries. Clearly everyone is not thrilled about this project. Stay tuned....
No comments:
Post a Comment