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Brewster Kahle on Google Book Digitization and the Future of Libraries
Of all the things I have read about the Google book digitization project and its consequences, this is one of the best. Listen to the interview (Lunchtime Listen!) or read the transcript.
- Google Faces Antitrust Investigation for Agreement to Digitize Millions of Books Online, interview with Brewster Kahle, Democracy Now!, April 30, 2009.
BREWSTER KAHLE: Let's take the out of copyright, the stuff that's really--it's public domain, meaning belongs to the public. It's lived long enough to become part of the public sphere. But there are perpetual restrictions that the libraries must perform, that if they get these digital copies back, they must put up restrictions on use, such that they cannot be accessible by the general public. AMY GOODMAN: Who can they be accessed by? BREWSTER KAHLE: People on campus can use them, for the out-of-copyright works, but just on campus. And otherwise, they have to put up restrictions. And what's turning out is a lot of these libraries aren't even bothering to get copies back, because what can they use them for? I mean, in the future, people are going to want to have access to as many books as possible. And what Google is doing is pulling these together for many libraries to build a great collection. Terrific. But the bits and pieces that are going back to these libraries don't make up a great collection. And what they can do with them is very, very limited. So these libraries aren't, in many cases, even bothering to get the digital copies back.Second, when Kahle asked if Google would share copies of digitized books with the Internet Archive, Google refused.
AMY GOODMAN: Conceivably, Google could give you the digitized copies, is that right? BREWSTER KAHLE: Yes, Google could, but they have refused. AMY GOODMAN: Why? BREWSTER KAHLE: They say that they've paid for the work. They want to be the place that people go to get them. So they are going to be the proprietors of the public domain.Although Google claims its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," it would be more accurate to say its mission is to make money controlling the world's information. Continue reading
National Academies Reports (1863 to 1997) Now Available in Open Access
The National Academies (The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council) have a long history of advising the government. Now, they have announced "the completion of the first phase of a partnership with Google to digitize the library's collection of reports from 1863 to 1997, making them available – free, searchable, and in full text – through Google Book Search. The Academies plan to have their entire collection of nearly 11,000 reports digitized by 2011."
- More Than 9,000 National Academies Reports Now Available in Open Access, press release, April 10, 2009.
Why is the 1957 Census of Govts deemed under copyright?
I just talked with a researcher who was interested in getting his hands on a digital copy of the 1957 Census of Governments. My momentary joy at finding a copy at the University of Michigan (my go-to library to find digital govt documents!) quickly turned to disappointment on seeing the message:
Page images and full text of this item are not available due to copyright restrictions.There ought to be a way for people/librarians to check the document for copyrighted bits and then quickly flip a switch to release it into the public domain and make it accessible to everyone. Is that too much to ask? Over time, we could lessen the impact that Google's scorched earth copyright policy has on documents that should rightfully be in the public domain. And another thing, why didn't they scan statistical resources to .csv files?! That is all. Continue reading
Google Books/Fed Docs: Google Books Statistics–The Bigger Picture
Now that I had some statistics it dawned on me I had no idea whether or not this was a lot documents. So I was off to the FDLP desktop and the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.
I looked around the desktop to see if GPO listed any statistics. On the "about" page for the CGP, GPO says merely that there are more than 500,000 records in the database. So I gave some thought to how I might get a better figure, and off I went to OCLC and the GPO database in FirstSearch. On the database info page, OCLC lists 507,000+ as the number of records and that the database had its last monthly update on August 8, 2007.
So I went back to the CGP and its advance search page. Searching for GPO in the publisher field is not terribly effective. Of course, in this database everything is a government document so that is not a problem.
But how to get a real number out of the database? I tried using the most common of words--a and the-- but to no great effect. A brings up 359,875 records and the brings up 411,493. Neither result comes close enough to the supposed 507,000.
I had another realization that the CGP now includes records for electronic titles--titles that would not be fodder for the Google Book Project. Using the New Electronic Titles page is not really an option to count them as it only goes back to April of 2005 and since early 2006 the monthly lists are not numbered (leaving me to do a lot of counting).
So back to the advanced searching page in the CGP. Happily here you can search for terms in the URL/PURL. I proceeded to search for every record that listed .gov, .mil, .us, .org, and .com. I came up with a total of 64,504 records. So approximately 13% of the records in the CGP are electronic titles or are titles with an electronic counterpart.
Unfortunately I had another realization that these figures really only represent documents published from 1976 on. This is a really big problem in that most of the documents I found in Google Books dated to before 1923. My only hope to get good numbers was to askGPO. So late on August 8th I shot off a query to GPO asking for statistics on the number of documents GPO has distributed both before and after 1976.
Surprisingly enough, GPO called me first thing the next morning. askGPO is notoriously slow in providing answers to queries so I was very surprised! I spoke with Nancy Faget at GPO and she was very pleasant though not exactly forthcoming with numbers. It struck me that I got the quick call back as GPO viewed my query as the first step in getting out of the program. As far as I know my director has no real intentions of doing that, but I don't think I convinced her on that point. But aside from that she told me that GPO really didn't know how many documents went to depositories since the beginning. Alas!!
I honestly don't know if would be fair to take the view that probably as much was distributed from 1813 to 1976 as was published after 1976. But if you did, that would lead to believe that over one million documents have been produced.
So the bigger picture suggests that the 167,878 titles in Google Books is only about 17% of all the documents that could be digitized. At a guess...
So I put a call out to everyone in GovDoc Land. If you are a full depository and have been one since 1813 and have kept really good records, could you please send me the statistics? Thank you very kindly in advance!
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Google Books/Fed Docs: Google Statistics from Scratch
Having found no published statistics for numbers of digitized books in Google Books, and especially nothing about digitized government publications, I was left with coming up with them on my own.
So I went to the Advanced Book Search screen for Google Books. Looking at the search options provided there I decided that the only way I could get reasonably useful statistics was to search for books published by GPO. As you are all aware not all government documents are actually published by GPO. Many are merely distributed by them. So I knew that my numbers would not be exact. Another problem was that over the years GPO listed themselves as publishers using a variety of abbreviations and phrases.
My first try was to use GPO in publisher and on August 8th I retrieved 141,600 hits. However just now when I ran it again, I only got 117,600. Hmmm.
Next search was for Government Printing Office, which retrieved both today and on the 8th, 43,600 hits. This was followed by gov't, which on the 8th retrieved 2,322 titles but today only retrieved 2,258.
The grand total for using these three searches on August 8th was 187,522.
Today as I was double checking my results, I also tried gov. print. off. and got 4,420 hits. So as of this morning the grand total is 167,878. I find it rather disconcerting that the number as dropped so much in nine days!
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