Google Books Library Project

In November 2006, the University of Virginia joined a growing number of leading libraries around the country as partners with the Google Books Library Project. The effort, launched as part of the Google Books Project in late 2004, is geared toward digitizing libraries’ collections to make them accessible to the whole wired world.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information,” says Ben Bunnell, Google’s manager of library partnerships, “and I don’t think the founders ever thought the information they were interested in was only on the Web. So the goal of Google Book Search was to put books on an even playing field with the Web pages in terms of ease of accessibility.”

The project launched with the so-called “Google Five”: The New York Public Library and the libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University.

The terms of the exchange between Google and its partners are fairly simple. The libraries receive digitized files of their content (not to mention increased visibility among Google searchers) and Google enhances its search offerings. “You want good coverage of information,” says Bunnell. “You want searchers to come to your site and feel like they are searching a large corpus of information, and we found that the more information you have in a search engine, the better the search results tend to be.”

An early and aggressive advocate for digitization, U.Va. kept close watch on the project from the beginning, says Associate University Librarian Martha Sites. “We started digitizing text more than 15 years ago. We had a dream that we could eventually digitize all the books in our library and even set out trying to do high-volume digitizing.”

For a legislative proposal, the library budgeted digitizing costs for its 5 million books and reached $300 million in short order. “We realized that to accomplish this goal in our lifetimes, it was going to take some outside partnerships,” says Sites.

Enter Google Books … and critics.

“From the first announcement of this project, I was deeply concerned that the libraries dealing with Google on this were making this move for the sake of expediency and sacrificing some of the core values of librarianship,” says Associate Professor of Media Studies Siva Vaidhyanathan. “There seemed to be no recognition that the libraries themselves were giving away their riches. It seems to me like corporate welfare, basically.”

Almost immediately, the project drew concern from publishers. “One of the things that amused me when the deal was first announced,” says James Hilton, University of Virginia vice president and chief information officer, “was that publishers starting raising concerns about libraries and copies and what would they do with this? I said, ‘Let me get this straight. We’re worried about libraries protecting books? It’s kind of what they do.’”

Others objected to Google’s policy of not making the digital copies available to other commercial search services. “Inherent in many of these arguments is the notion that once a book is digitized it is used up or something,” says Bunnell. “But it is not used up. We are not saying you can’t scan it again with someone else.”

Several options have popped up in recent years, including the Open Content Alliance, creating alternatives for those wishing to digitize without a corporate relationship. The OCA, which lacks the financial backing and scanning capabilities of its much larger and more powerful counterpart, has signed on many partners, including U.Va.

The dual membership does not solve the issue for critics such as Vaidhyanathan. “Once you do it with Google, what is the incentive to let someone else in? Google has a huge ability to crowd out competing projects or complementary projects.”

Hilton says the project’s potential benefits are still revealing themselves. “One of the things we have talked about is, imagine you are writing computer programs to do translations from one language to another. Think of what you can do, for instance, in terms of testing against 50 different translations of Macbeth. I don’t think we have a clue yet about how useful that text can be in very automatic, algorithmic ways. You are talking about new forms of scholarship, which is what fair use is, in fact, all designed to preserve.”

Hilton, who was one of the Google Library Project’s first partners in his information technology role at Michigan, says digitization’s impact in the library world cannot be overstated. “The ability to go in and index millions of books, to make that findable on the Web, is huge and, I would argue, transformative. I believe the more projects out there, the better, because getting the printed word in digital form and making it searchable and accessible is key to the future. If information is not online, it will not be found. It will become irrelevant over time.”