Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>> I have done some thinking about your findings that a small percentage of the German books were available in Google Books. It seems that there are two completely different conclusions one could draw from this:
>>
>> a) physical libraries need to be nurtured, protected, and expanded;
>> b) it's a national emergency that cannot be tolerated and must be fixed as soon as possible.
>>
Firstly, I was not focusing on German titles to find out about their
coverage. It just so happened that the sample contained many German
titles. We wanted to know to what extent books actually charged out in
our library can be found in GBS.
German stuff up until 1900 will pretty soon be covered quite well,
either in GBS (19th cent) or in separate projects covering 15th to 18th
centuries.
Last week or so, it became known that La Bibliothèque de France is
reversing their anti-Google attitude, formulated by former
director Jean-Noël Jeanneney:
"Google and the myth of universal knowledge":
http://books.google.de/books?id=rc19MRhlUEgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Jean-No%C3%ABl+Jeanneney&cd=1
The new director, Bruno Racine, together with French minister for
culture Frédéric Mitterrand, wants to forge some sort of alliance with
Google under a new agreement covering the rights of French publishers
and authors. Under this, out-of-print 20th century French works
would be digitized in their entirety.
http://www.humanite.fr/2010-03-25_Cultures_Google-Une-chance-pour-demain
Racine has also criticized Europeana and Gallica, the French digital
flagship, for lagging behind expectations.
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Mar 31 2010 - 03:17:02 EDT