Joe,
It is being done. See http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
However, IMHO, there isn't a critical mass of libraries willing to
expend the resources to do this in a way that can keep up with the
volume the Google is handling. Or to take on the legal challenges.
- Michele
On 7/1/2010 9:40 AM, Montibello, Joseph P. wrote:
> 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/>
>
>
>
>
--
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Michele Newberry Assistant Director for Library Services
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Gainesville, FL 32606 fclmin_at_ufl.edu
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Received on Thu Jul 01 2010 - 09:55:15 EDT