So, this big news from Google…
…which, by now, has made the rounds of the library blogs, as well as some of the scholarly ones, so I feel redundant commenting on it, as well as still rather amateurish compared to lots of the other people who’ve done so already.
However, I will say that it’s not every morning that you start reading your e-mail and find multiple messages from multiple library mailing lists all saying variations on “Have you heard about the Google text-digitization project?”, and then you look at your other e-mail account and your friend who works in IT has also forwarded you a link, and then you bop over to the New York Times online and find that the story is front page news. (How often do e-text projects make the front page?) And then not long thereafter, your academic friends are talking about it as well, and you find yourself discussing markup languages and OCR with people who are not usually into that kind of thing.
Whether it can be pulled off on the scale and at the speed they’re proposing — and whether the participating libraries will feel pressured to reduce their print holdings as a result, which some people are worrying about (though my guess would be that the participating libraries have already thought about this, a lot) — remains to be seen. But you know what’s gotten me excited? Besides the thought of all the things you could do with the resulting massive sets of text and images, that is? It’s the way these conversations about technology and access to information are spilling over into the mainstream. Imagine how interesting it’ll get with librarians and scholars and tech people all talking with each other about what’s at stake in migrating vast stores of information from one format into another, and what we might be able to do after that. And, because I’m a big fan of interdisciplinary approaches, I can’t help but think this is to the benefit of all concerned.
So. 1) End of print as a technology? No, and I think it’s kind of baffling to claim, as ALA president-elect Michael Gorman does, that the project is based on “the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of
communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous
forms.” Come again? I don’t think Google is presupposing that, nor do I see it happening. New technologies don’t automatically obliterate older ones, especially when each has its own set of uses that aren’t identical to the others. Count me as format-agnostic: I like my read-long-stretches-at-a-time print books and I like my searchable, intelligently marked-up e-text, for different practical reasons, and in an ideal world there’d be plenty of both. And I really don’t think I’m alone on this, either. 2) End of libraries? Also no. In fact, I think I’m constitutionally skeptical of all reports of the demise of reading and/or institutions devoted to helping people find things to read (and listen to and look at). 3) Beginning of something potentially very interesting? Yes, I rather think it is.
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