January 6, 2005

• Not everything is on Google.

  The following is something interesting to consider for the net-oriented among us. It was forwarded to me by a friend of mine who is on a professional library list serve:
  

  My concern is that people will now think that “everything” is in Google, even more so than they do now. Then, if they don’t find it in Google, they will think it doesn’t exist. (See this interesting article on how a professor was called a liar because a talk radio host couldn’t find information he referred to through Google – The Danger of Google History in a Time of War http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/28/news-levine.php)

  A big gap in the project seems to be copyrighted works. From the NYT article:

  “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.”

  Works currently under copyright are arguably the most important works, because they represent recent scholarship. A case could be made that for works no longer in copyright, many libraries already have the more important ones anyway. Not to be ungracious, and this may be overstating a bit, but those millions and millions of volumes coming online are simply out of date scholarship that is in need of weeding.

  Am I right that the non-inclusion of copyrighted works makes this a much less bigger deal than people are making of it? Or have I missed something?

  Marc Meola
  Humanities Librarian
  The College of New Jersey

  Basically, there is a perception that everything can be found on the net, and that perception is growing as more and more people rely on the net as their primary source of information. My friend strongly recommends the article “The Danger of Google History in a Time
  of War”. It is possible that this issue could have relevance on the whole “web logs vs. print” discussion as well.

  • 11:48 pm
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