Through the joint efforts of Google and its many university partners, many millions of books on virtually every topic under the sun are in the process of being scanned, i.e. “digitized”, for eventual mass consumption. Just how this mass consumption is to be provided is the burning question. Should libraries take more of the “distributed” stance, that each college should provide the full book content for every book in their collection? Or should libraries encourage private companies to put forth the effort to house and deliver this most valuable content, as modern-day Libraries of Alexandria? What of that important, but seldom voiced value of “redundancy”?
The “Hathi Trust” may be the answer to the redundancy issue: http://www.hathitrust.org . It is a site where 13 of the Google Books universities are archiving and sharing their digital book collections. To search for and within, view the full text of, and read these books, just point your browser to: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls . This is the beta version of the Hathi Trust search engine.
I believe that metadata-based search and deep search based on digitized content are not mutually exclusive, but instead are complementary approaches. Full-text search tends to return too much; search based on metadata alone can return too little. A combination of the two should result in incredibly powerful search environments. Even when we get to the point where all book content is available digitally, I think that creating high-quality metadata records will continue to be a valuable activity. (Breeding, 2008)
For teaching libraries like Roosevelt, it’s probably just too costly to digitize the full text of their entire collections at present. Perhaps eventually the CARLI consortium will be able to leverage its influence, in terms of providing its content for digitization, to obtain digital copies of the results of the endeavor, like the members of the Hathi Trust. And yet, who is to say that the current crop of digital copies of these many millions of books is truly viable? The quality of these images, and their resulting “satisficing” value in the market of library users, will be taken into consideration when their pricing settles to the point where profit is maximized. And so, perhaps a bit of waiting is the best option, given the fact that scanning technology will probably continue to improve and that the cost of digitization will likely continue its decrease.
References:
Breeding, Marshall. “Beyond the Current Generation of Next- Generation Library Interfaces: Deeper Search. Computers in Libraries, May2008, Vol. 28, Issue 5. In Academic Search Premier.
Comments