The first five libraries that jumped on the Google digital book train took time at the recent ALA Annual Conference to weigh in on how things are going. The Google Five are the libraries of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and Stanford and the New York Public Library.
Though all five said that they were “pleased with the progress” they also acknowledged that there have been some issues, which range from books being damaged to questions about the quality of searches being performed. One library had someone complain because some of the scans have thumbs visible! And over at Oxford’s Bodleian Library they have a 1% problem. One percent of their books have uncut pages, meaning that they’ve never been opened, making them unscanable.
The damaged books issue has to raise some bright red flags. These guys are not scanning trade hardbacks or mass market paperbacks, they are scanning much of the choice material held in the special collections of these institutions. Any damage is a significant event.
Dale Flecker of Harvard University library says that they were “filtering out a lot of works that are not physically up to being scanned.” Noting that there have been problems dealing with the brittle paper of many of the works and with some of the bindings. And remember, this deal allows Google to take possession of these treasures and actually remove the books from the library and take them to their scanning facility.
What has always struck me as worrisome about this part of the agreement is that here they have given Google permission to take these artifacts to their house when they won’t permit their students or the scholars who intimately know these works a chance to check them out.
The tools of the technology, in this case the scanning machine, that were developed to help bring these book treasures to our desktop are now also involved in the selection process. It’s limitations are deciding what gets digitized.
Library Journal piece on the “Google Five” from their Academic Newswire