Global library heralds new information era

I completely agree. Google is just continuing to change the face of day-to-day living. I can't wait to see the results of this new innovation. I love Google, information, books, and libraries. This is terrific news for a change!


Global library heralds new information era
12-16-2004, 07h07

NEW YORK (AFP) - Moves by Internet search giant Google to create a global virtual library could signal a communications revolution on a par with Johann Gutenberg and the invention of moveable type in the 15th century.

"We've been talking about it here in those kind of terms," said John Wilkin, associate librarian at Michigan University.

Michigan and four more of the world's top libraries -- Harvard, Stanford, New York Public Library and the Bodleian in Oxford -- announced this week a deal with Google to digitise millions of their books and make them freely available online.

"This just changes the landscape so completely," Wilkin said.

"The research library, which was not very accessible before, will be available to everybody. The focus will start to shift to electronic space for all of our scholarly communications," he said.

Michigan and Stanford are planning to digitise their entire library collections -- totalling some 15 million books -- while the Bodleian is offering around one million books published before 1900.

The Harvard and New York Public Library contributions are smaller, but the entire project is still expected to take up to 10 years, with cost estimates ranging from 150 million to 200 million dollars.

"This is a great leap forward," said Michael Keller, librarian at Stanford University which has been digitising texts on a far smaller scale for several years.

"This new arrangement catapults our effective digital output from the boutique scale to the truly industrial," Keller said.

The project will grant global access to landmark publications and other rare out-of-print titles that previously were only available to specialised researchers on an appointment-only basis.

Among the historical books held by the participating libraries are a 1687 first edition of Isaac Netwon's "The Principia," owned by Stanford and Charles Darwin's 1871 classic "The Descent of Man" in the Bodleian.

"It's a revolution," Ronald Milne, the Bodleian's acting head librarian told the Times of London.

"In terms of what Gutenberg's invention was all about, enabling books to be disseminated cheaply, it is very much comparable to that," Milne said.

The access issue is as much about scope as price, and the Google project may ruffle some feathers in countries like China which still have lengthy lists of banned books.

"Once you have the research library available to anyone with an internet connection, it's going to be very hard to influence what people can see and what they can't see," said Michigan's Wilkin.

Books which have passed out of copyright and into the public domain will be available in their entirety, while the reproduction of newer titles will require the publishers' permission.

For Google, the move allows the company to get a jump on its competitors in what can only be an expanding field, and observers say the company will boost advertising revenue through increased user volume.

Publishers should also benefit, as excerpts of books still under copyright will be accompanied by purchase links.

"Every bit of anectdotal evidence has confirmed that when an in-print book is made available on the internet, the sales go up," Wilkin said. "So, I think publishers will see this as a boon."

The project is an extension of an existing Google Print program, which allows users to search contents of newly published books.

"This is a win-win situation for everyone involved," agreed Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library.

"It is central to our mission of making our collections democratically accessible to a global audience, free of charge," LeClerc said.

The Google project is not the only one of its type, although it is far and away the largest.

The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library, announced this week an agreement with libraries from five countries, including the United States, Canada and Egypt, to put one million digitised books on the web.