Jim Weinheimer said the following in a posting earlier today:
"...I think that once the Google-Publishers agreement goes through sooner or later (and the publishers can't hold it back forever no matter how much they might want to stop it!), librarians are going to have to ask themselves some hard questions."
Last month I posted something about this to various library lists. The posting could be summed up as follows:
"How would you reply to a non-librarian administrator who asks 'We just paid $xx,xxx dollars to Google for access to millions of e-books. Why do we need to keep buying books for the library?'"
Most replies to this posting were along the lines of:
"With the uproar we would hear at my school from faculty in areas like arts and humanities who still value the print book, it would take little message from me to change their minds."
"Those aren't new questions in that they began to surface when the state and regional networks began to emerge a few years ago. I am not sure the availability of these through subscription even matters in that there are any number of administrators who are already assuming that they are currently available."
"That question is no different than the variation we get now for journals when they say 'everything is on the web already' or for purchases through our state consortium."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't think these are particularly good answers, especially in these trying fiscal times.
What librarians will need (once a GBS settlement is reached) is a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Google Book Search. What does it do well? What doesn't it do well? What will users like about it? What won't users like about it? What sorts of books will still need to be purchased (i.e., are there some kinds of things you WON'T be able to get via a GBS subscription)? In other words, some clear talking points that will make sense to administrators...something beyond the old argument that some of your library users like the look and feel of physical books.
Bernie Sloan
Received on Wed Oct 07 2009 - 16:16:26 EDT