Google Scan Plan
The Google scan plan– digitizing libraries collections in the public domain, and making them available online– sounds like a logical next step in preserving information and making it available. However, all I’ve heard from other library students is reticence, and concern. Others in the field are worked up about the corporate implications of working with Google, so much so, that University of Michigan (a participating library) library head Paul Courant has blogged at length defending his decision. As librarians, it makes sense to worry about books becoming obsolete. Too often, it seems, that reluctance to change clouds people’s mind as to ideas that, while different, and new, are logical.
Digitizing collections allows more people to access rare information that they previously would have had to physically go and look at; it preserves the books by allowing them to be handled less; and it creates a back-up should something happen to the original so the information is not lost. Too often, we get caught up in the horrifying notion of the library of the future where there are no books and people go in and put on headsets for the few moments it takes stories to be absorbed directly into their brains. Libraries have endured for centuries, and only with a willingness to evolve, will they continue to remain relevant.
To be fair, given that precious shelf space is taken up more and more by DVDs, audiobooks, video games etc., sometimes it does seem like good old-fashioned books are being pushed to the back. This scan plan is not, however, the attempt to eliminate books that some want to make it out to be. If books weren’t important, why would anyone do this? Why would 28 libraries (and counting) make their collections available to Google?
As keepers of the culture of information, librarians must remain open-minded. It disturbs me that this attitude is coming from individuals who haven’t even completed their course of study yet. Let the grey-haired librarians be resistant to change; it’s our generation who are supposed to swoop in, keep adapting, and keep libraries alive.
Filed under: By: The Librarienne, MLIS, News | 2 Comments
Tags: collection preservation, digital library technology, google, Google scan plan, library new
I think the way this post is right above the one about the I-hate-computers guy is a great example of how people everywhere hate change and are stupid.
The librarians I know (a subset admittedly limited to the two of you) will defend to the death the decision to put in DVDs, movies, and poor people front and center in the library because they are making information more succesful. And yet (here I am shifting from the subset of librarians I know to librarians I have heard about) they will criticize someone else using technology to make information more accessible. It’s absurd.
Google’s corporate model is Do No Evil, and for the most part they do okay at it. They are threatening in many ways, and they appear on course to amassing more direct power than has the United States government, and that does concern me immensely. At the same time, though, projects like this one are among Google’s best — they are taking something and making it more, better, faster.
It makes sense to think twice about both changes and to spend some time gaming out the possible consequences — namely, that both could kill books as a medium.
Even faced with that worst case scenario, though, I have to say: so?