ResourceBlog Article: Dan Cohen: Yes, Google is Good for History But It's Not Perfect

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Friday, 8th January 2010

Dan Cohen: Yes, Google is Good for History But It's Not Perfect

From the Inside Higher Ed Article:

At a discussion of "Is Google Good for History?" here Thursday, there weren't really any firm "No" answers. Even the harshest critic here of Google's historic book digitization project confessed to using it for his research and making valuable finds with the tool.

But that doesn't mean Google Books wasn't criticized. In a discussion at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, scholars questioned the way Google has organized the books project and whether it was doing enough in quality control. At the same time, though, many comments suggested deep appreciation for the company's efforts. And some suggested that Google has become something of an unfair target for academics who pay little attention as other companies charge college and university libraries high fees for their materials. Over the course of the discussion, not only did Google take a few hits, but so did librarians and professors (although the Google representative left it to the academics to criticize themselves).

Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media, at George Mason University, kicked off the discussion with a strong defense of Google's book digitization efforts.

Cohen stressed that he was under no illusions that Google is perfect. He is among those who -- before everyone was doing it -- shared a find he made of a scanned book by Google that featured a human hand that shouldn't have been visible. And he admitted -- anticipating the criticism that would follow -- that there are numerous mistakes in Google, of titles and categories (especially in the metadata used to classify books for search purposes).

But he said errors are inevitable and was more critical of Google for not releasing more of the tools it has created to classify books so that scholars could better understand them and use them. He said Google was uncharacteristically secretive about the digitization project, although he acknowledged that this is no doubt in part because of all the litigation over it.

The full text of Dan Cohen's Speech, "Is Google Good for History?" is available online.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

UPDATE

See Also: Paul Duguid from UC Berkeley spoke on the same topic. You can watch his presentation here.

Hat Tip: The Laboritorium

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