Google and University Libraries…
Google Library (Google Weblog)
Much of the discussion around this endeavor has focused on its effect for the largely-affluent and privileged children who go to the major universities from which the books are taken. Will they stop going to the library? Will they miss the smell of dead trees? Will they be able to do research more efficiently? With all due respect, this is the wrong group to think about. The real beneficiaries of this scanning should be the less fortunate people around the world who barely have access to a library, let alone a world-class one. Let us scan these books for them.
This post from Aaron Swartz at the Google Weblog explains some of the particulars of the agreement between Google and 5 major university libraries to digitize their entire library collections. He points out the projected timelines and at the end makes a very good point about why this matters. We have a lot of issues with copyright to deal with, but in the end what Google and the universities in the agreement are doing is making their collections available to the world. This is really pretty amazing… Combine this with initiatives such as Google Print and if you weren’t’ already doing so, you really have to start to think differently about how we teach kids to access information…
