From: Alice Sullivan (sullivan17@llnl.gov)
Date: Tue Dec 14 2004 - 17:14:09 PST
Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.2.20041214171049.0215a600@mail.llnl.gov> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 17:14:09 -0800 From: Alice Sullivan <sullivan17@llnl.gov> Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
FYI
>Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
>
>December 14, 2004
> By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT
>
>
>
>
>
>Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet
>search service, plans to announce an agreement today with
>some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford
>University to begin converting their holdings into digital
>files that would be freely searchable over the Web.
>
>It may be only a step on a long road toward the
>long-predicted global virtual library. But the
>collaboration of Google and research institutions that also
>include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and
>the New York Public Library is a major stride in an
>ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is
>to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic,
>body of material and create a digital card catalog and
>searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers
>and special collections.
>
>Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer
>- has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced
>today while also adding its own technical abilities to the
>task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands of pages
>a day at each library.
>
>Although Google executives declined to comment on its
>technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved
>estimate the figure at $10 for each of the more than 15
>million books and other documents covered in the
>agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could
>take at least a decade.
>
>Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the pacts
>are almost certain to touch off a race with other major
>Internet search providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo.
>Like Google, they might seek the right to offer online
>access to library materials in return for selling
>advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help
>in digitizing their collections for their own institutional
>uses.
>
>"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be
>digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the
>Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries
>today," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University's head
>librarian.
>
>The Google effort and others like it that are already under
>way, including projects by the Library of Congress to put
>selections of its best holdings online, are part of a trend
>to potentially democratize access to information that has
>long been available to only small, select groups of
>students and scholars.
>
>Last night the Library of Congress and a group of
>international libraries from the United States, Canada,
>Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a plan to create
>a publicly available digital archive of one million books
>on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000
>volumes online by next April.
>
>"Having the great libraries at your fingertips allows us to
>build on and create great works based on the work of
>others," said Brewster Kahle, founder and president of the
>Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library
>that is also trying to digitize existing print information.
>
>
>The agreements to be announced today will allow Google to
>publish the full text of only those library books old
>enough to no longer be under copyright. For copyrighted
>works, Google would scan in the entire text, but make only
>short excerpts available online.
>
>Each agreement with a library is slightly different. Google
>plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in
>Stanford's collection and the seven million at Michigan.
>The Harvard project will initially be limited to only about
>40,000 volumes. The scanning at Bodleian Library at Oxford
>will be limited to an unspecified number of books published
>before 1900, while the New York Public Library project will
>involve fragile material not under copyright that library
>officials said would be of interest primarily to scholars.
>
>The trend toward online libraries and virtual card
>catalogs is one that already has book publishers scrambling
>to respond.
>
>At least a dozen major publishing companies, including some
>of the country's biggest producers of nonfiction books -
>the primary target for the online text-search efforts -
>have already entered ventures with Google and Amazon that
>allow users to search the text of copyrighted books online
>and read excerpts.
>
>Publishers including HarperCollins, the Penguin Group,
>Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic have signed up for both the
>Google and Amazon programs. The largest American trade
>publisher, Random House, participates in Amazon's program
>but is still negotiating with Google, which calls its
>program Google Print.
>
>The Amazon and Google programs work by restricting the
>access of users to only a few pages of a copyrighted book
>during each search, offering enough to help them decide
>whether the book meets their requirements enough to justify
>ordering the print version. Those features restrict a
>user's ability to copy, cut or print the copyrighted
>material, while limiting on-screen reading to a few pages
>at a time. Books still under copyright at the libraries
>involved in Google's new project are likely to be protected
>by similar restrictions.
>
>The challenge for publishers in coming years will be to
>continue to have libraries serve as major influential
>buyers of their books, without letting the newly vast
>digital public reading rooms undermine the companies'
>ability to make money commissioning and publishing authors'
>work.
>
> From the earliest days of the printing press, book
>publishers were wary of the development of libraries at
>all. In many instances, they opposed the idea of a central
>facility offering free access to books that people would
>otherwise be compelled to buy.
>
>But as libraries developed and publishers became aware that
>they could be among their best customers, that opposition
>faded. Now publishers aggressively court librarians with
>advance copies of books, seeking positive reviews of books
>in library journals and otherwise trying to influence the
>opinion of the people who influence the reading habits of
>millions. Some of that promotional impulse may translate to
>the online world, publishing executives say.
>
>But at least initially, the search services are likely to
>be most useful to publishers whose nonfiction backlists, or
>catalogs of previously published titles, are of interest to
>scholars but do not sell regularly enough to be carried in
>large quantities in retail stores, said David Steinberger,
>the president and chief executive the Perseus Books Group,
>which publishes mostly nonfiction books under the Basic
>Books, PublicAffairs, Da Capo and other imprints.
>
>Based on his experiences with Amazon's and Google's
>commercial search services so far, Mr. Steinberger said, "I
>think there is minimal risk, or virtually no risk, of
>copyrighted material being misused." But he said he would
>object to a library's providing copyrighted material online
>without a license. "If you're talking about the
>instantaneous, free distribution of books, I think that
>would represent a problem," Mr. Steinberger said.
>
>For their part, libraries themselves will have to rethink
>their central missions as storehouses of printed, indexed
>material.
>
>"Our world is about to change in a big, big way," said
>Daniel Greenstein, university librarian for the California
>Digital Library of the University of California, which is a
>project to organize and retain existing digital materials.
>
>Instead of expending considerable time and money to
>managing their collections of printed materials, Mr.
>Greenstein said, libraries in the future can devote more
>energy to gathering information and making it accessible -
>and more easily manageable - online.
>
>But Paul LeClerc, the president and chief executive of the
>New York Public Library, sees Web access as an expansion of
>libraries' reach, not a replacement for physical
>collections. "Librarians will add a new dimension to their
>work," Mr. LeClerc said. "They will not abandon their
>mission of collecting printed material and keeping them for
>decades and even centuries."
>
>Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have long
>vowed to make all of the world's information accessible to
>anyone with a Web browser. The agreements to be announced
>today will put them a few steps closer to that goal - at
>least in terms of the English-language portion of the
>world's information. Mr. Page said yesterday that the
>project traced to the roots of Google, which he and Mr.
>Brin founded in 1998 after taking a leave from a graduate
>computer science program at Stanford where they worked on a
>"digital libraries" project. "What we first discussed at
>Stanford is now becoming practical," Mr. Page said.
>
>At Stanford, Google hopes to be able to scan 50,000 pages a
>day within the month, eventually doubling that rate,
>according to a person involved in the project.
>
>The Google plan calls for making the library materials
>available as part of Google's regular Web service, which
>currently has an estimated eight billion Web pages in its
>database and tens of millions of users a day. As with the
>other information on its service, Google will sell
>advertising to generate revenue from its library material.
>(In it existing Google Print program, the company shares
>advertising revenue with the participating book
>publishers.)
>
>Each library, meanwhile, will receive its own copy of the
>digital database created from that institution's holdings,
>which the library can make available through its own Web
>site if it chooses.
>
>Harvard officials said they would be happy to use the
>Internet to share their collections widely. "We have always
>thought of our libraries at Harvard as being a global
>resource," said Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard.
>
>At least initially, Google's digitizing task will be labor
>intensive, with people placing the books and documents on
>sophisticated scanners whose high-resolution cameras
>capture an image of each page and convert it to a digital
>file.
>
>Google, whose corporate campus in Mountain View, Calif., is
>just a few miles from Stanford, plans to transport books to
>a copying center it has established at its headquarters.
>There the books will be scanned and then returned to the
>Stanford libraries. Google plans to set up remote scanning
>operations at both Michigan and Harvard.
>
>The company refused to comment on the technology that it
>was using to digitize books, except to say that it was
>nondestructive. But according to a person who has been
>briefed on the project, Google's technology is more
>labor-intensive than systems that are already commercially
>available.
>
>Two small start-up companies, 4DigitalBooks of St. Aubin,
>Switzerland, and Kirtas Technologies of Victor, N.Y., are
>selling systems that automatically turn pages to capture
>images.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?ex=1104066668&ei=1&en=d4bc7ad62773dd85
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