On 7/27/2011 6:57 AM, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> However, it's what you've got since
> full-text you seem to be mostly allergic too for some reason, although
> after all these years I'm still not sure why.
You're REALLY not sure why? I am. I don't think it's any great
mystery, and it's certainly not that libraries or librarians "don't
like" or are "allergic" to full text for some reason. (If that were
true, would so many libraries have been so eager to be Google Books
partners?). Some combination of:
1. Legal reasons. It is unclear that we have the legal right to scan
full text on our own without paying for it, and it's often infeasible to
even find who you'd pay for it if you wanted to, let alone negotiate
such agreements with them all. You did know about the Google Books
lawsuit, right?
2. Technical reasons. Libraries lack the technical resources/capacity to
do this ourselves. (Not just the scanning, but then changing all our
user-facing systems to take advantage of those scans, while having a
rationale back end workflow too).
3. Monetary reasons. It's expensive, no matter how you cut it. If you
scan it yourself, if you get the scans from someone else, if you have to
pay content owners for rights to do it and use it, if you build the
software yourself for all parts of this system, or if you try to pay
someone else for a turnkey solution (if there was someone selling it).
Maybe #2 above is really a variation of this, because with enough money
you can hire the staff and buy the equipment to solve technical difficulty.
The only people who think libraries are not providing full text search
in their catalogs and discovery systems because they don't WANT to are
people who haven't actually worked in libraries (or have worked in
particularly disfunctional libraries, I guess).
Plus, some library-sector discovery interfaces ARE starting to do this.
I am not sure, but I think either or both of Summon or WorldCat Local
either have or are working on getting it so HathiTrust full text is
indexed, and attached to the metadata for library holdings as well, so
you CAN search full text to get to library holdings. It's not a
coincidence that this being done by vendors, who have the resources to
implement (and to take the legal risk of the unclear legality).
Jonathan
Received on Wed Jul 27 2011 - 12:09:37 EDT