NPR/KCRW radio show "To The Point" -- and the Wall Street Journal -- report that Web-search giant Google is archiving books from several major universities. The goal: let readers worldwide access works of world-class libraries (e.g., Oxford), right on the Web. The plan: scan 1-1.5 million works. Yes, MILLION. Expected time needed: around two to three years. (Perhaps we can look for jobs like "Copier Drone" on Monster.com sometime soon).
If the scan goes according to plan, Google-able items from Oxford would range from papyrus (the first pulp fiction?), and works from Christ's age, up through 21st century books. The planned first step is to scan 19th century texts. Works the Oxford folks are most excited to get online include a manuscript of the novel "Frankenstein", Handel's "Messiah" score, and more.
So, if you always hated the time and dust involved in going deep into the stacks at a great library -- or for some reason you never took a liking to the Dewey Decimal System -- this googlibrary project should be a godsend (or is it Goodsend?).
Note that, while the ambition/size/scope of Google's project to netify a vast virtual Uni-library is impressive, online-braries do already exist; classic books are available for free on many sites (such as Project Gutenberg -- info at
http://promo.net/pg/ ). However, when Google steps into an arena, there is a good chance they will do something bigger and/or better than what has come before, so keep an eye on the ongoing scan-plans of the net's 800-pound Goorilla.
(Speaking of 800-pound gorillas, Microsoft has been making a very big push into Google territory lately, with a new and improved MSN Search, and a new desktop-search toolbar meant to directly compete with Google's desktop search product. As mergers seem to be increasing in the biz world lately, I can't help wondering if Microsoft and Google will ever combine forces -- imagine what a 1600-pound MEGArilla could do! Sure, a few antitrust concerns might flare up, and it's hard to tell who would eat who -- but rest assured, if a Migoosoft ever DOES come to pass, TRR will let you know.)
Final note: Just as mighty Microsoft has a large R&D lab, Google has Google Labs -- which has already taken steps to make Google more Uni-library-like with its new (still in Beta) service, "
GOOGLE SCHOLAR". Their website describes it this way:
"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications."
# posted by Don @ 1:02 PM
