Google, Inc. recently announced plans to team with the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library to make their collections available online to Google users, according to a Dec. 14 release.
Louise Robbins, director of the University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Studies, said the partnership will benefit the universities because more people will have access to their materials.
“Libraries want their collections to be used and they would get more use without someone having to be physically present [at the library] Robbins said.”
Robbins added that a partnership with Google could also give the libraries publicity and save them money.
“If Google is funding the digitization, it’s a huge advantage because libraries don’t have enough money to do all the digitization that is planned in this project,” Robbins said.
Despite UW having a wonderful digital collection of unique, rare and valuable research materials, UW usually only digitizes material not found at other universities, Robbins said.
Robbins added there is not much point in digitizing commonly held materials because many libraries already have them.
Charles Dean, a senior technology librarian for the UW Library Technology Group, which deals with the technical end of putting together digital collections for the UW System, said online UW Library materials are a wonderful resource for the UW community.
“Probably the biggest benefit [of library digitization] is increased access,” Dean said. “Faculty, staff, students [and] UW alumni … can get materials pretty much anywhere in the world with a computer, a connection to the Internet and a UW ID.”
However, the Google project will have limits. The only documents completely available online will be those no longer protected by copyright law, according to the release. Only excerpts or bibliographic information will be available for copyrighted works.
Robbins said such limitations will be extensive because copyright protection for material created today extends far into the future.
Dean said copyright law is a challenge in his work.
“There’s lots of great content out there that we [can’t digitize] because of copyright restrictions,” Dean said. “There’s so much … We’ve just scratched the surface.”
Dean added that popular material in danger of being ruined by time is prioritized for digitization.
However, Robbins said digital copies of books can be even more difficult to preserve than hard copies.
“We don’t know the longevity of digital materials [because] we really don’t know how long a CD-ROM will last,” she said. “[However], we know that good paper has a very, very long life.”
Due to constant changes in technology, compatibility is a challenge. Some libraries have digital resources that are already unreadable.
“We do our part — at least for the materials we digitize here from the library’s collections — to save collections in a form that is ‘platform independent,'” Dean said. “[This is so] they can be archived and migrated to new applications that come along down the road.”
