What's in a Name?

Against the Grain, Nov 2013

By Steven Shapiro, Published on 11/01/13

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What's in a Name?

W hat's in a Name? Steven Shapiro 0 1 0 Montclair State University 1 by Bob Holley, Professor, Library & Information Science Program, Wayne State University , Detroit, MI 48202; Phone: 313-577-4021; Fax: 313-577-7563 Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation - Three Cheers for the Google Books Project! I’d compare the Google Books Project to efforts to settle the American West in the 19th century. If I’m remembering my history correctly, the railroads received massive land grants from the government but would make money from these grants only if they sold the land to settlers. The railroads then convinced settlers to migrate to the Great Plains, often through overoptimistic descriptions. The railroads may have profited unfairly from the government largess and may have even bribed some government officials to do so, but the government achieved its objective of populating the plains. In the same fashion, Google may be setting itself up to gain exorbitant future profits, may be trampling on authors rights, may be eliminating future competitors, and may be guilty of wholesale copyright violations; but Google is getting the job done. I don’t see any competitors even on the distant horizon. What other entity has the goal of digitizing human knowledge? Libraries, of course, but they don’t have the money and certainly can’t expect sufficient grant funding from the federal government that has enough problems with the current economy. If I were a Google stockholder, I might even ask questions at the next annual meeting because this investment is a risky bet that may take many years to valorize. I haven’t yet read any comparisons between Google Books and the creation of numerous major microform sets from the 1950s to the 1980s. (My Google search suggests that none exists.) The vendors selected various projects of greater or lesser importance, found the items to film, produced the film/fiche/micro-opaque copies, and sent their salespeople out to pitch the sets to the academic library community. I am almost certain that the libraries that provided the items for filming received some benefits from the filming, at the minimum, a free copy of the set. While this filming didn’t involve the legal complexities of the current operation since virtually all the materials weren’t covered by copyright partly because many publishers filmed materials included in retrospective bibliographies of older publications but also because the reach of copyright didn’t extend as far into the past as it does today. Other companies could have created competing versions of the same product. Imagine this taunt: “Our version of Early English Books is better than your version of Early English Books.” The companies, of course, didn’t compete because such duplication wasn’t economically viable. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I don’t see the need for a competing project. As I said above, I certainly haven’t identified any other corporation that would undertake it. If librarians have created registers of microform masters to avoid duplication in preservation microfilming, why is it so important to duplicate digital versions? If the settlement is finally signed and passes Department of Justice scrutiny, Google might be willing to look at creative ways t o i n c r e a s e sales by making available subsets of the digital archives for specific purposes. I could see some use in identifying, just as an example, Core Resources in Political Science. Subject experts in the field would select the titles. A library could buy them in the same way that they used to buy major microform sets. Google might create the sets itself or might license such sales to third parties. Finally, I don’t see any reason why companies or individuals couldn’t produce bibliographies based upon the Google holdings to be used by libraries for specific acquisitions purposes. I don’t think that doing so would violate copyright in the slightest way. I’ve thought over this issue for nearly a month. Unlike some others, I see mainly advantages. One million public domain books from Google Books are now available on the Sony eBook Store. Amazon is offering for sale around 400,000 books in more than 200 languages from the University of Michigan’s digital archives. I believe that these concrete accomplishments outweigh any theoretical objections. Three cheers for the Google Books Proj ect! Op Ed from page 42 world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is g (...truncated)


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Steven Shapiro. What's in a Name?, Against the Grain, 2013, Volume 21, Issue 4,