Building the House we Shall Live In
There are two very interesting posts from Peter Brantley at UC Berkeley about the library’s relationship with the Google Books library project.
The first says bluntly “we made a mistake.” Libraries should not have allowed Google to woo them singularly and in secrecy. “Regardless of what is given us, whenever we might feel grateful for the generosity of the enriched, we must still own the defining of our expectations.”
In the second, he clarifies that he applauds the Google Books project, but that libraries were too passive about how the terms were set, that as a whole we need to seize the opportunity to open up public discussion of the issues.
I conclude by urging libraries: let us engage deeply in these issues, not only amongst ourselves, and search engines, but with publishers and authors. Let us break open this dialogue to better understand among the cacophony of voices all of the richness of our different perspectives, and struggle through the differences more openly and straightforwardly. Only through this is any emergent consensus possible. The alternative is that new understandings will be imposed on us. Let us instead build the house we shall live in, together.
Yes! Yes! Yes! (And thanks for pointing it out, Tony.)
Posted: March 14, 2007 by Barbara Fister
in Scholarly Communications, Technology Issues, Worth Reading.
Comments
Pingback from Lousy Publishers!
Posted: June 13, 2007 at 8:40 pm
[...] Peter Brantley (whose interesting thoughts have been blogged about here before) has an interesting post on university presses, scholarly communication, and what it is that libraries don’t get when it comes to publishing. Putting it bluntly, he says “I am coming to the conclusion that librarians are likely to be lousy publishers.” The publishing work flow is intense: it requires significant hand- and thought-work. Editors don’t sit around at their desks waiting for pretty, tightly-formed, well-argued drafts to come floating by. There is a lot of work in finding, attracting, grooming talent; encouraging the actual writing; producing coherent drafts; editing; presentation; administration; rights; marketing; and distribution. Some of these things are made easier by Web 2.0 and social computing, but in most cases, the workload has only increased, at least in the short term…. Not everything is going to be improved by being processed through a collaborative, social mill. The best things are always going to take somebody’s care, and love. [...]
Pingback from Siva Vaidhyanathan Questions Google Book Search
Posted: April 23, 2007 at 10:57 am
[...] These are serious charges, some of them have surfaced in a previous ACRLog post. As for the Google Library Partners side of the story, their public statements do point to the public good as a motivation for making their collections more widely accessible, and it’s hard to fault them for that. Vaidhyanathan’s comparison to the Human Genome Project seems unfair–no governments were willing to step up to digitize books on anything like the scale of Google Book Search as far as I know. According to the University of Michigan, it would have taken them more than a thousand years to digitize their collection on their previous pace of digitizing. New York Public Library strikes a cautious tone in their statement and hardly seems to be rushing into anything. As for quality control and metadata issues, I don’t know, but the FRBR Blog has reported that a Library of Congress working group on bibliographic control has recently met with Google. It’s an interesting point about library’s relationship with publishers–however there is an argument that GBS will help publishers to sell more books from their back catalogs. [...]