ResourceBlog Article: Berkeley Law School Professor on Google Book Search and Libraries

contact us \| suggestion

Receive the weekly sampler of posts and "Resource of the Week".
Subscribe »

My Account »

If you find ResourceShelf useful, please supply a testimonial »

Home > ResourceBlog > Article

« All ResourceBlog Articles

Wednesday, 14th October 2009

Berkeley Law School Professor on Google Book Search and Libraries

In a post on Sunday, we mentioned the writing of Law Professor Pamela Samuelson from the UC Berkeley Law School (she is also has a Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information). At that point, she had written three columns about Google Book Search.

Today, she has written a new piece for The Huffington Post. The column is titled, Google Books Is Not a Library and in many was is a response to Sergey Brin's Op-Ed column in the New York Times last week.

Here are just a few selected passages. Make sure to read the complete column.

Unlike the Alexandria library or modern public libraries, the Google Book Search (GBS) initiative is a commercial venture that aims to monetize millions of out-of-print books, many of which are "orphans," that is, books whose rights holders cannot readily be found after a diligent search. David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, has estimated that about twenty per cent of the books in the GBS corpus are orphans, but other estimates are higher. Even twenty per cent, however, equals millions of books.
[Snip]
If Google Books was just a library, as Brin claims, library associations would not have submitted briefs expressing reservations about the GBS settlement to the federal judge who will be deciding whether to approve the deal. Libraries everywhere are terrified that Google will engage in price-gouging when setting prices for institutional subscriptions to GBS contents...Prices for these subscriptions are to be set based on the number of books in the corpus, the services available, and prices of comparable products and services (of which there are none). Given that major research libraries today often pay in excess of $4 million a year for access to several thousand journals, they have good reason to be concerned that Google will eventually seek annual fees in excess of this for subscriptions to millions of GBS books.
[Snip]
Brin forgot to mention another significant difference between GBS and traditional libraries: their policies on patron privacy. The proposed settlement agreement contains numerous provisions that anticipate monitoring of uses of GBS content; so far, though, Google has been unwilling to make meaningful commitments to protect user privacy. Traditional libraries, by contrast, have been important guardians of patron privacy. When you enter a library, you can search for books without anyone tracking your queries, you can read whatever is available for as long as you want without anyone monitoring your intellectual privacy, and you can check books out knowing that the records of what you've checked out will be protected from disclosure by state laws and by librarian ethics obligations.
[Snip]
That Google will serve ads alongside search results that yield GBS results is not surprising for the open Internet searches that users will do. But Google is now pressing university partners to accept ads even for the institutional subscriptions.

Read the Complete Column

Source: The Huffington Post

See Also: This post contains links to Professor Samuelson's other columns in The Huffington Post

Category:

Search News (ResourceShelf)

blog comments powered by Disqus

« All ResourceBlog Articles

FreePint Family

A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »

Latest Family Articles:

Quilting big data threads
Thursday, 24th May 2012

Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.

The fallacy of information overload
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?

Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure?
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.

Newsdesk: tracking millions of pieces of information a day
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?

Alacra Compliance adds managerial oversight
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).

All Family Articles »
Family Articles by Category »

Tell us what you're working on,
and we'll talk to you about how FreePint can help »

FreePint Family Testimonials

"Fabulous resource to learn of unique tools and insights. Very useful." Manager, Futures and Forecasting, Virginia, USA

More testimonials »

Subscribe to the ResourceShelf Newsletter and receive the weekly sampler of posts and Resource of the Week.

Find out more »

ResourceShelf sponsored by:

Article Categories

Search News (9339)
Source File (9518)
Web 2.0 (2568)

All Article Categories »