22.12.2010 17:40, Ross Singer:
>>
>> No technical or theoretical reason, yes. GBS is doing it, with
>> structured metadata provided by you know who. One of the reasons
>> for us is that we don't have the full text and won't get it.
>>
> Although we have only ourselves to blame. It's not as though the
> internet archive or Open Content Alliance haven't been trying to
> find libraries to work with them - libraries just can't be bothered.
>
Only ourselves to blame? I don't think blame is the right term, and how
much would blame help anyway.
Don't overlook the Hathi Trust. But while that is a bold attempt at
doing useful things with book scans obtained from Google, one has to
realize that all of it is old stuff. But what's getting the most use in
GBS will be the new stuff, the books presented with publishers' consent
and more or less "abridged", but still highly useful not only because
there is fulltext search of the entire content but also because at least
the ToCs are there and quite an amount of the real stuff. And precisely
that, the access to new content, albeit limited, is what libraries could
not offer, however much they might want and try. For publishers, GBS
has the additional appeal that it can serve as a marketing platform,
and partnering with Google may bring more income to publishers than
opposing and suing it. With libraries, that'd be a very different story.
> Too busy working on our LibQUAL+ data and sitting in ALA committee
> meetings about the future of the ILS/catalog/cataloging/profession
> or whatever, I guess.
>
There's truth in that, but we also have to see that good will to
do new things is not enough. For those things we are talking here,
the library community is overwhelmingly undercapitalized. And, see
above, their hands are bound much more than Google's, in legal terms as
well as in economic potential and managerial flexibility.
B.Eversberg
Received on Thu Dec 23 2010 - 03:04:47 EST