Hola,
Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
> You're REALLY not sure why?
Now, now, as you well know, I'm *full* of conspiracy theories, bile
and speculation. What my question really was getting to is the library
worlds lack of ability to engage with the problem in a meaningful way.
So let's dig in ;
> 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?).
Because that's easy; doing it yourself is hard.
> 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?
Of course. But this is also a place where the libraries haven't been
able to push through their importance. Copyright does give exemptions
to "commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or
scholarship, archiving, access by the visually impaired etc." (with
emphasis on 'archiving' and access) and where rights are "limited for
public interest reasons", to which I think we all agree that libraries
and the services they offer (or, could offer) certainly is just that.
Yes, it's an interesting lawsuit and all, but there needs to be made a
distinction between having the material in digital form (archived,
possibly OCRed) and making digital copied material available (like
Google Books do). I'm not interested in the latter, nor arguing for
it, and shouldn't really come in contact with the Google case.
> 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).
Yes, agree, in as so far you admit to these things being either
terribly expensive or completely incomprehensible to learn and do
yourself. However, I think we differ in that I wouldn't agree with
such thoughts. There's cheap ways of doing the scanning, and there's
smart people around to both do it and develop the services derived
from it. It's about having the guts and distinction to do it.
> 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.
I think this is something you've convinced yourself of rather than it
being a truism. Lots of really good and complex systems have emerged
from little-to-zero funding with enough smarts and energy to feed it.
Mobilizing and herding the convictions people have in the library
ideals and joining forces across the libraries and volunteers across
the world should make this one a doozey, but again, it's about guts,
about gusto, and about wanting something bad enough (and possibly
about internal bickering about ownership and petty cost, all which can
be resolved without too much tears).
> 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).
That wasn't my claim, so this is either a non-argument, or at worst a straw-man.
Toodles.
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Wed Jul 27 2011 - 21:20:09 EDT