librarian.net

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a short blurb and the dean of libraries Paul Courant has a longer post on his own blog.

The University of Michigan has hit the “one million books scanned” milestone. As far as I know Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its own collections digitized and available for search (and, when in the public domain, available for viewing.)

For more about the scanning project generally including some insight into why people call it controversial, there’s a good long article from Campus technology (link to printable version, all on one page) which gos into the logistics of the scanning program in some depth.

When it comes down to it, then, this brave new world of book search probably needs to be understood as Book Search 1.0. And maybe participants should not get so hung up on quality that they obstruct the flow of an astounding amount of information. Right now, say many, the conveyor belt is running and the goal is to manage quantity, knowing that with time the rest of what’s important will follow. Certainly, there’s little doubt that in five years or so, Book Search as defined by Google will be very different. The lawsuits will have been resolved, the copyright issues sorted out, the standards settled, the technologies more broadly available, the integration more transparent.

What happens to your library book before it gets to the shelves? This Flickr photoset can walk you through it. I learned bunches of things. Thanks to the Hatcher Library at the University of Michigan and Alexis for putting it all together.

The Usability Working Group of the University of Michigan University Library has a new website up which aims to “provide open access to our reports and working documents in order to share our findings with the University of Michigan Libraries as well as the community-at-large.” [web4lib]

Edward Weber was the curator of the renowned Labadie Collection at the University of Michaigan for 40 years and an “outspoken advocate of the underdog.” [thanks michael]

University of Michigan President defends their relationship with the Google Book Search project (full speech pdf download). Intriguing comments below including Siva and a plug by librarians’ own SuperPatron on another way of harnessing the power of the Google Book Search for libraries. [thanks molly]

Why is the Google/UMich contract being posted in the first place? Doesn’t it say CONFIDENTIAL all over it? Well, if you’re a public university, you can’t just make confidential agreements without them being subject to freedom of information laws. More on the Google Watch site, and a little more over at the LibraryLaw blog in the form of a letter from the guy who filed the FOIA request.