Hi all,
Stephen Paling wrote:
"To put it a bit differently, what I want is ~in~ the document, not next
to it as a surrogate. The amount of information that is available online
now dwarfs the information available in print, and searching within
those online resources is typically far more useful to me."
I know this is a dumb question but I'll ask it anyway. How come Google
can scan books (that they get from libraries??!?) and make a huge
database out of it and make a ton of money off of it (not yet, but does
anyone think they won't?) - but libraries can't?
<overdramatic but you know what I mean> I think it's because we can't
get organized. We want MARC or FRBR or RDA or whatever. And after all
the fields have been decided on, we want a fully developed, working tool
to hop out of the grass. Then we want "other libraries" to use it for a
year or two to work out all the kinks, and then we'll be ready to form a
committee to examine whether this new tool will work for our users in
our specific environment.</obykwim>
What if we scanned all those books for our own bad selves? What if we
ripped off Google's idea of making searches against full-text? This
would answer Stephen's need to find things in the book - a need that
librarians know about. (I regularly tell students that what they need to
do is go upstairs, get the book off the shelf, and then look at the
table of contents and index to see if the thing they're interested in is
covered in the book.) So we can't offer the full text of books because
of copyright issues (Google cut that Gordian knot, but anyway).
Wouldn't it help to be able to offer a clue that a specific topic, that
might not be a chapter heading or a book title or any other piece of
metadata that we would reasonably expect to create, but that is in the
text, is in the text? Wouldn't it help to offer a page preview that
shows (in a paragraph or two) someplace that the book was mentioned?
Instead of sharing metadata through OCLC, what if we shared digital
copies of books? Upload when you're done scanning, download when you
buy a copy of a physical book, edit when someone made a crappy scan on
page 32 and you can do a better one, etc? Then those scanned, uploaded,
downloaded books became part of our search index, like in Google books,
with limited previews or full text or as much as we can get away with?
Joe Montibello, MLIS
Class of 1945 Library
Phillips Exeter Academy
Web: http://www.exeter.edu/library <http://www.exeter.edu/library>
Blog: http://academylibrary.wordpress.com
<http://academylibrary.wordpress.com/>
Received on Thu Jul 01 2010 - 09:41:33 EDT