One of the things I really enjoyed about the Internet Archive Open Library project was the software they used to attempting to determine whether works they were scanning were or were not under copyright. It was an elaborate set of questions and answers with access to some copyright databases. In contrast, unless I’m mistaken, Google Books just draws a line at 1923 and assumes everything after that date is in copyright. This includes government information which as you know is made with tax dollars and generally in the public domain. So why does Google Book Search treat all post-1923 books as under copyright? Just over-cautious?
Tag: google
google book search, info from the source
James Jacobs — the guy from diglet who had been writing to Google to try to get “find in a library” added to ALL Google Book Search results — went to see Daniel Clancy, the Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project speak at Stanford. While the talk wasn’t to librarians and wasn’t really about the social implications of the book search, James did learn a few things.
– Clancy mentioned that Google was NOT going for archival quality (indeed COULD not) in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned
– about 70% of the book project use was coming from India.
– 92% of the world’s books are not generating revenues for copyright holders or publishers
If Googl Book Search really interests you, you might also like to read The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story [pdf, today’s library link o’ the day] which discusses some of the misinformation and lawsuits surrounding the Google Library porject and comes down on the side of Google’s fair use position.
Google Book Search amplifies our efforts
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]
find in a library?
How come only some books in the Google Book Search have “find in a library” links next to them? Diglet asks, and gets an answer, sort of a lame one if you ask me. update: Kevin mentioned in the comments that it would be great to see this for all books in Google Books. I went to bed thinking “Oh yeah, I should look into that….” and while I was sleeping, Superpatron, aka Ed Vielmetti solved the crime, er problem, and created a Greasemonkey script (a plug-in that you can run with Firefox) that does this for Ann Arbor and can be modified for any library.
when is a search engine not a search engine?
Is it okay to remove sites from search results in response to lawsuits? Check out this search and make sure you read the disclaimer at the bottom. Then read about Google agreeing to censor their results in China, begging the question “Are censored results better than none at all?” Gmail and Blogger will also not be available to Chinese users of Google. As a quickie example, you can see the results for Tiananmen Square searches: US Google, Chinese Google, Chinese Google search using Chinese characters. The Chinese searches have the disclaimer “æ®å½“地法律法规和政ç–，部分æœç´¢ç»“果未予显示” or “In accordance with local laws, regulations and policies, part of these search results are not displayed.” This is all in addition to other blocking strategies, commonly referred to as The Great Firewall of China. However in this case Google.cn doesn’t just block searches for keywords, it blocks selectively sometimes without saying that it’s doing so. Slightly more explanation and intrigue over at Search Engine Watch, Google Blogoscoped and Google’s own official blog.
Why does this matter to librarians? Well, it’s obvious how it matters to librarians in China. It also calls into question the very idea of objectivity in search engines everywhere. As Google spends more time and effort currying favor with librarians trying to show how sympatico they are, this move is a departure from expanding access. People who search Google.cn for topics like Tibet or Falun Gong (or possible even other less innocuous topics) won’t just find an absence of results, they’ll find results that are skewed towards the Chinese government’s policies about those topics. That’s wrong. Pundits argue that this is a sensible move for Google from a business perspective, and I won’t debate that, but it does serve to starkly highlight the differences in saying “free acces to information” if you’re a for-profit shareholder-owned company. Any librarian who has had to grapple with a filter with an unknown blacklist will be familiar with the struggles that people on the non-filtered side of Google are going through trying to figure out just what is happening. [metafilter]