Karen Coyle wrote:
> The current
> participating libraries are the only ones with influence over Google's
> product in terms of how it serves libraries.
>
> It's been my impression that Google has worked closely with those
> libraries, but has mainly been in contact with the folks who negotiate
> contracts, not with those who provide services to users. Google is,
> however, bound to provide a licensed product to academic institutions
> based on the settlement. Google also states publicly that it cares
> very much about providing a quality product for those institutions. In
> the end, that may not translate to what we think of as quality
> metadata, but only if we express our needs can we later say: we told
> you what we need; you could have easily provided it. It may not GET us
> what we need, but I think an honest attempt on our part is the only
> way to go.
While people may have nice visions of Google, we have to remember that Google is a for-profit corporation, so it has certain legal responsibilities to certain parties, and relatively few to others. Libraries are in the latter category. Also, Google is a notoriously secretive organization (see: http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/internet/interimrankings.pdf for more information). So when they say: "that [they care] very much about providing a quality product for those institutions," I begin to roll my eyes. McDonald's does it all for me, too!
Google will do what is good for Google, and then it is the task of their PR people to convince the public that what they do is in each person's own interests as well. I am making no positive or negative judgments here: this is just the way corporations function, and it is important for libraries to understand, now that "information" is a big--very big--business, that this is the world that we are entering.
When this reality came home to me was Google's decision *not* to implement OAI-PMH, which I, in my naivete, had thought was a real solution to some of the problems. Google has decided to go with topic maps, which no doubt will be much simpler than either OAI-PMH or certainly MARC21.
My concern(? rather, consideration?) is that whatever Google decides will be the de facto standard for everyone, taking over the traditional role of LC when it has decided to do something (or not do something) and everyone else has had to follow along, or scramble like crazy. Of course, LC is a library and places library concerns at the top, whether we individually agree with their decisions or not. Google is *not* a library, not does it have library concerns at the top of their agenda.
I still find it almost incredible that Google has managed to scan so many books in such a short time. This was science fiction only 15 years ago! While I definitely am in favor of what Google has done, we need to keep our eyes open. I think are entering a brand new stage in the history of librarianship, or more specifically, we entered it several years ago but matters will come to a head with Google. It started with the electronic journals, how we gave up so much control over the selection, cataloging, access and so on, and now it is continuing (quite logically) into books.
How we navigate this difficult time will be both very interesting and treacherous.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Sep 15 2009 - 03:11:35 EDT