Thanks to Google, it may one day be possible to avoid all those overdue library charges by reading all books online. Recently, colleges such as the University of Michigan and Harvard University have collaborated with the search engine Google.com in pilot programs to digitize volumes in their libraries.
Harvard joined forces with the Google Print program, which aims to eventually digitize entire library collections, allowing an unlimited number of users to search for and then read books on the Internet. Although only books that have no copyright restrictions can be read in their entirety, Google Print lets users read excerpts from books that are still under copyright and offers a link to a library where that book is located.
But although some scholars have raved about the prospects of such a project, others are more skeptical about how online books will affect the way people read.
“We’re still in a ‘wait-and-see mode’ to see what happens with other schools,” said Jean Ferguson, senior assistant librarian at Perkins Library. “Our concern is that they are not actually helping them link to the library catalogue, so we’re not sure they’ll be able to have an in-depth search of their materials.”
Google has also compiled a database, Google Scholar, that lets users search various universities and organizes the search results by relevance.
Duke participates in Google Scholar, but it has also recently developed the Digital Production Center, a new enterprise with the goal of digitizing library collections and expanding digital content to the Duke community.
Tina Kirkham, manager of DPC, said because traditional scanning could damage old or rare volumes, much of the work is done by scanners mounted on a stand overhead that shoot down at the object and move across it pixel by pixel to create a digital file. This process allows for extremely detailed images at more than 10 times their normal resolution. Scanning procedures like the ones at Duke take between 30 seconds and 2 minutes per page—which means it would take more than nine and a half years of continuous scanning to put the University’s full collection online.
The Google Print initiative has invested in technologies that allow it to scan books at much higher speeds. Some scanners can even automatically turn the pages, dramatically increasing the efficiency of the process.
“Digitizing scholarly material enables scholars to see connections between scholarly materials that would be impossible to see in the analog world,” Kirkham said. “If those materials can all be digitized and brought together, a scholar can see the full range of these documents all at once and make intellectual connections among those materials that couldn’t happen if those documents were separated by thousands of miles.”
Matt Cohen, who heads the Walt Whitman Archives digitization program at Duke and teaches a class about digital textuality, is a big proponent of digitization of information, but he said there are some things you get from physical texts that simply cannot be obtained through their online versions.
For example, he said the social dimension of the library is key to creating an intellectual environment. “That’s why we have classrooms,” said Cohen, assistant professor of English.
He also said books are useful because they tell you something sociological about a text: “If you want to look up what book everyone reads on a particular subject, you look at which one has been hammered, worn down.”
Cohen believes it is critical for readers to understand texts as they are because books have meanings in three-dimensional ways due to their look and feel—whether readers are aware of it or not.
“If you just doubt me, make one of your guy friends read a romance novel,” Cohen said. “I guarantee one of their friends will come up to them and say ‘Dude, you’re reading Flame of the Flower? What’s up with that?!”
Peter Kosewski, director of publications and communications at Harvard University Library, said it is too soon to tell the impact Google Print will have on the university since the 40,000 volumes that are being digitized do not even comprise 1 percent of Harvard’s selection. He said, however, it could eventually grant students and faculty access to the 5 million volumes that are housed in a depository off site.
“Libraries are much more than books—for example, we have 8 million photographs,” he said. “Libraries are not going away.”
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