google hands
The Google Book Library Project keeps attracting more and more academic libraries: Cornell, Harvard, NYPL, Princeton, Stanford, Ghent, the UCs… like it or not - they are gonna get everyone. Clearly, there are some issues with the information model proposed by Google. In the “web world” (cf. with Karl Popper’s World III), Google gets a lot of criticism for having imposed itself as a hegemonic power and the near-unique gateway and discovery mechanism for web resources. As Google is a stock-quoted corporate company, this is not cool. The Ippolita Group has nicely summarized the ontological, epistemological and political implications of PageRank’s world domination in the great book “The dark side of Google” (only available in Italian, I’m afraid - c’è qualcuno interessato a darmi una mano a tradurlo?)
The recent invasion of more scholarly domains - via Google Scholar and Google Book - raises even more concerns. However, criticism is not aiming much Google Scholar, a mere extension of the traditional Google search, using open protocols (OAI-PMH and OpenURL) to harvest and rank scholarly literature, as it is Google Book Search. Why? Google Book uses the same, user-friendly, widely-known interface of Google Web Search to offer, in reality, a different type of service. The way that traditional Web Search works is that Google indexes website contents, calculate some metrics and ranking to then provide pointers to relevant websites - content does not sit on Google servers (other than recently cached pages). In Book Search, instead, Google hosts (owns) the entire book - content sits on Google servers. This smells, because Google, though providing free access (beware, *free* not open access) becomes the owner of the book (only when the book is out-of-copyright, you’re allowed to download entire content).
In the past few weeks, I have been bumping into a lot of commentary about the Google Library Project and its discontents: the overall quality of its service, the faulty metadata, the strong partnership with academic libraries and the scanning errors. This last one is, probably, the least important issue, but certainly the more fun. I downloaded two books yesterday (The trial and death of Socrates and The Integrative action of the autonomic nervous system) and I was lucky enough to find two scanned hands in each one of them. I actually don’t mind this. In fact, I am quite happy that a human component is taking such a strong part in the digitization process: turning the pages. These busy hands (probably grad students?) are mimicking, in full, the act of reading a book. They make digital books smell (a bit) like real books. These hands might end up trapped in these books forever. I say keep them there. I like them.
