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Google Books As "Train Wreck" For Scholars
Following up on our earlier discussion, here's more detail on Geoffrey Nunberg's argument that Google Books could prove detrimental to academics and other scholars. Recently Nunberg gave a talk at a conference claiming that the metadata in Google Books is riddled with errors and is classified in a scheme unfit for scholarly use. This blog post was fleshed out somewhat a few days later in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Quoting from the latter: "Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, [and] Stephen King's Christine... A search on 'internet' in books written before 1950 and turns up 527 hits. ... [Google blames some errors on the originating libraries.] ...the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves. ... In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore." The head of metadata for Google Books, Jon Orwant, has responded in detail to Numberg's complaints in a comment on the original blog post — and says his team has already fixed the errors that Nunberg so helpfully pointed out.
The odd thing about complaining about this is, what are they comparing to? A hypothetical perfect online database that doesn't exist anyways? The article says google got it wrong in some cases where, e.g. the Harvard Library got it right. OK, that's an issue for all of us deciding whether to search on our nearest computer, or at the Harvard library.
To me, google's project was a long time coming - somebody had to scan the world's back catalog. Maybe it would be better if governments had done it, but (and this is the point) they didn't. Google is.
Google has scanned many volumes of the Laws of Indiana, which go back to 1816. These are the session laws of the Indiana General Assembly and have never been copyrighted. However, Google has arbitrarily decided not to make most post-1922 volumes it has digitized, and even some pre-1922 volumes (e.g. 1877, 1893, 1895, 1909, 1917 and 1918), available, using the claim of copyright.
Google has done all the decision-making here. Anyone who might object to the classification of one of these volumes as copyrighted and thus available in "snippet-view only" presumably would have the burden of proving the contrary. (And where would you even start? Who would you contact? I have seen nothing on this.)
Once (or if) the settlement is approved early this fall, Google's "rights" attach to these volumes. If I understand correctly, at that point any individual who wishes to access one of these volumes of Indiana's session laws not already in "full view" will have to pay for it, and for the money will obtain only individual rights, NOT the right to make it freely available to others.
Broader implications: Finally, this analysis has been limited to volumes of Indiana session laws, but surely similar situations exist more broadly.
For more on this, see this Aug. 2, 2009 Indiana Law Blog entry: http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2009/08/courts_my_probl.html
And this is no exception. Before google books you had access to books from various libraries, books you owned, books you could loan from friends (*shock* *gasp* copyright infringement), books you could buy and books from non-google online sources. Now you have access to all of those and additionally google books. Even if google books is 99% "piece of shit" (which in my experience is simply not true, but nevertheless) you still have the 1% potentially useful material available that wasn't available before, so you win.
Definatly. It's like, "Oh, look, I found an error. If I had done this, that error wouldn't be there!!" And to that I respond, then do it yourself. YOU go tack metadata onto the 100 million books they have, you smug egocentric bastard.
And, of course, he completely ignores the 999,999 proper entries compared to the 1 error. Google seems to know there's lots of problems here, and they're not going to get it right the first pass. But having a first pass at all is better than nothing.
Yes, having all of the world's literature available for instant full text search sounds
disastrous for scholars.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Tangential, but "card catalogs." Ha! I once had a compelling need to look up an article in the Occasional Papers of the Bingham Oceanographic Collection. So I went to the card catalog.
It wasn't under O. It wasn't under P. It wasn't under B. It wasn't under C.
It was under N.
Why? Because, naturally, as of course everybody knows, the Bingham Oceanographic Collection is part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)... ...is in New Haven.
The great thing here is that you can't even say there was an error in the card catalog, unless filing something under a heading that is perfectly correct, but under which nobody would dream of looking for it, is considered an error.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Exactly. And the whole argument totally ignores the fact that these books are now easily available.
Shock horror: I am a liberal arts scholar. And Google Books has helped me incredibly in a project I am doing on a 18th century scholar. I have original texts in various editions at my fingertips, wonderful reference books (including a dozen 18th and 19th century Latin grammars), and serious secondary literature. Not all of these are fully posted on Google Books, but now I know what books to check out of the library, or even buy.
As an arts scholar, I love Google books.