Google Digitization Survey Results

The results of the Google Digitization Project survey can be found at this site.

The survey questions were taken from what some folks in the LIS community were saying. While some of the questions seemed hyperbolic, the thoughts behind them were “out there” in the media/listservs and we used the forced-choice Likert response scale purposefully.

Our conclusion is most people are confused about the emerging digital world of information science. Only time will tell us what contribution Google will have on this world and there is no sense in “hand-wringing,” as one respondent put it.

Thank you again!

Shawn Nelson

European project will be an alternative to Google's online library

European Libraries Fight Google-ization
The European project will be an alternative to Google's online library

In a stand against a deal struck by five of the world's top libraries and
Google to digitize millions of books, 19 European libraries have agreed to
back a similar European project to safeguard literature.

Nineteen European national libraries have joined forces against a planned
communications revolution by Internet search giant Google to create a
global virtual library, organizers said Wednesday. The 19 libraries are
backing instead a multi-million euro counter-offensive by European nations
to put European literature online.

"The leaders of the undersigned national libraries wish to support the
initiative of Europe's leaders aimed at a large and organized digitization
of the works belonging to our continent's heritage," a statement said.
"Such a move needs a tight coordination of national ambitions at EU level
to decide on the selection of works," it added.

The statement was signed by national libraries in Austria, Belgium, the
Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia,
Slovakia, Spain and Sweden.

The British National Library
The British National Library has given its implicit support to the move,
without signing the motion, while Cyprus and Malta have agreed verbally to
the text. Portugal is also set to approve it.

US libraries' deal with Google

The move, organized by France's national library, comes after Michigan
University and four other top libraries -- Harvard, Stanford, New York
Public Library and the Bodleian in Oxford -- announced in December a deal
with Google to digitize millions of their books and make them freely
available online.

Michigan and Stanford are planning to digitize their entire library
collections -- totaling some 15 million books -- while the Bodleian is
offering around one million books published before 1900.

The Harvard and New York Public Library contributions are smaller, but the
entire project is still expected to take up to 10 years, with cost
estimates ranging from $150 million to $200 million (116 million euros -
154 million euros).

French fears of online cultural imperialism

Google's plans have rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising
fears that French language and ideas could be just sidelined on the
worldwide web, already dominated by English.

French President Jacques Chirac has asked Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu
de Vabres and France's National Library president Jean-Noel Jeanneney to
study how collections in libraries in France and Europe could be put more
widely and more rapidly on the Internet. President Chirac is due to address
the question during his opening address to a meeting of EU culture
ministers in Paris on Monday and Tuesday.

Future perception of the world at risk, say French

Jeanneney has acknowledged that such a project, comprising some 4.5 billion
pages of text, would help researchers and give poor nations access to
global learning.

But he added: "The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is
confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the
definition of how future generations conceive the world."

Some call it Victor Hugo vs. Harry Potter; it's almost certainly David vs.
Goliath. The strong man is the Internet search engine Google. The underdog:
a top French librarian who doesn't want Anglo-American domination. (April
9, 2005)

Google Print article in MIT magazine

"Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death
of libraries-or their rebirth?"

Roush, Wade. The Infinite Library. Technology Review. May 2005.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp

Wimax - Next Disruptive Technology

"The Next Disruptive Technology"

By Monica Rivituso
SmartMoney.com (c) 2005 All Rights Reserved

IN TECHNOLOGY, THERE'S ALWAYS something bigger and better around the
corner. And when it comes to wireless, that something is WiMax.

WiMax isn't a new music player or gaming gadget - it has the potential
to be much more transformative than any lone gizmo.

So, what is it? WiMax is the catchy name for a new wireless standard.
Similar to how 802.11 was marketed as WiFi [Ed: wireless networking],
WiMax is the consumer-friendly branding of 802.16, or high-speed
wireless broadband [Ed: broadband is commonly thought of as highspeed
internet], capable of spanning greater distances than WiFi. Whereas WiFi
typically provides wireless broadband service up to 150 feet in
so-called hot spots, WiMax is capable of covering a radius of three to
10 kilometers (about two to six miles).

Consider the possibilities here. While it's still not deployed on any
kind of mass scale, WiMax could serve as another last-mile broadband
technology - and a pretty significant one at that, according to
analysts. Some say it will be hugely important to developing nations,
where widespread broadband access isn't as prevalent as it is in the
U.S. Others say it could be deployed much more cheaply than traditional
wire-line technologies even in the U.S., since trenches wouldn't have to
be dug and pricey wires wouldn't have to be snaked around. WiMax doesn't
even require a direct sight line with a base station to work, making it
particularly attractive, for example, in rural areas with lots of trees.

Sure, there's a lot of speculation at this point and plenty of hype
regarding WiMax, but it's hard to dismiss something that could be so
affordable. Eric Mantion, senior analyst at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based
market research firm In-Stat, calls WiMax "the rebel broadband," because
you can deploy it to 85 million or so homes for about $2 billion.
Compare that to SBC Communications' (SBC) plans to spend $4 billion to
connect 18 million homes with high-capacity fiber cable for bundled
high-speed Internet, voice and television services.

The economics alone could make WiMax seriously disruptive to data and
voice services, potentially opening up the field to companies that
aren't the usual go-to guys when it comes to this kind of stuff (read:
cable or DSL providers). Let's say it was incorporated into set-top
boxes - providing high-speed wireless broadband, voice-over-IP [Ed:
voice-over-IP = VOIP = telephone service over the internet] and a
satellite television receiver. That's data, voice and video wrapped up
in one high-speed, cost-efficient package, posing not only a challenge
to cable outfits, but to phone companies as well. "That makes it
horribly attractive from an economic standpoint compared to any other
technology current or planned," says Mantion. And given the number of
Internet radio stations out there, WiMax could even pose a threat to
satellite radio upstarts XM Satellite Radio (XMSR) and Sirius Satellite
Radio (SIRI)..."

"New Librarians" survey

The results of a survey done on new librarians in the academic world can be
found at http://www.trinity.edu/mmillet/professional/NewLibProject.htm.

The April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine is now available

The April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now
available.

This issue contains four articles, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from
recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items
of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. The Featured Collection for April
is 'IMAGES: Seeing the Invisible' courtesy of William Lewis and James L.
Burch, Southwest Research Institute.

The articles include:

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Overview
Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund and Joanna Scott, Nature Publishing
Group

Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea
Ben Lund, Tony Hammond and Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing Group; and
Martin Flack, NeoReality, Inc.

Initial Experiences in Developing a Chronologically Organized Digital
Library for Continuing Education in Biodefense
Donna M. D'Alessandro, MD and Michael P. D'Alessandro, MD, University of
Iowa Carver College of Medicine

Survey of the Providers of Electronic Publications Holding Contracts
with Spanish University Libraries
Blanca Rodriguez Bravo and Maria Luisa Alvite Diez, University of Leon

Bonnie Wilson
Editor
D-Lib Magazine

Interesting Screencast

You might find this “screencast” to be of interest. It talks about using scripts to show if a book is available at a library by enhancing a web page with a script. It uses Amazon.com as an example but I was thinking that maybe this could be adapted to show if a book in your collection was for example available at another library if it was not available locally. It is a very cool concept.

Visual Search Engines

There was an interesting article in the 3/1/2005 issue of Library Journal that talks about a new wave in the world of search engines.

Grokker (one of the best of these new tools) is partnering with libraries (most notably Stanford) to develop a visual search engine. Grokker is also talking to EBSCO to allow "visual" searching of its databases. The author hints in the article that Google might add a visual search engine as an optional interface.

I downloaded the 30-day trial of Grokker (it costs $49 per copy after that) and found it to be quite interesting. It is particularly good if you do not know exactly what you are looking for -- it is a browsing tool. I was able to find some information I was looking for that I could not find with a Google search.

Do Libraries Still Matter?

"In the era of the Internet, will we still go to libraries to borrow books and do research? The answer seems to be a resounding yes, because libraries are more than just a place to keep volumes on dusty shelves."

The full text of the article is available here.

What IS a librarian

More than a decade ago, Sarah Pritchard, then director of libraries at Smith College and now university librarian at UC Santa Barbara, shared the following message with the LIBADMIN list. It remains my favorite summary of what it means to be a professional librarian.

Damon Hickey, The College of Wooster

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1993 14:15:22 -0400
From: "Sarah M. Pritchard"
Subject: What IS a librarian?
Sender: Library Administration and Management
To: Multiple recipients of list LIBADMIN
Reply-to: "Sarah M. Pritchard"

While generally I have been in agreement with the comments of those in favor of keeping the term "librarian," I have some additional thoughts in response to Damon Hickey's challenge to discuss what it is -- if anything -- that different segments of the "library" profession have in common.

Part of the very problem in library science and library schools is that other academic and professional disciplines do not believe that there is a solid theoretical or methodological underpinning to our profession, thus wonder why we need a graduate degree instead of some technical/vocational approach. We have not done a very good job in our schools of combatting this, and it leads to school closings, trivialization of library research, and endless whiny defensiveness cloaked as lofty "status" arguments.

In fact there are many broad conceptual issues and frameworks that we should all have in common, whether we are children's, public, small college, medical, research university or corporate librarians. Until we understand and promulgate these we will continue to have internal fragmentation and external disregard.

Here are just a few of the things I have in mind:

librarianship as the study of recorded communication (regardless of format);

how to understand the different purposes of communication (education, leisure, creativity, information, public debate, etc.) nature of communication formats as an issue in itself;

how to choose among formats, user behaviors and differences among user groups -- here's where you can study individual groups such as children or engineers, but what must be stressed is that we study users and the ways they get and use informational, educational, and creative communication;

how to analyze and communicate with diverse communities of users intellectual freedom -- including issues of access, privacy, public policy (and you better believe this applies even in the corporate world) economics of the publishing, vendor and related industries and how these affect access, organization, format, delivery, etc.

systems analysis for processing information -- that is, don't just say "we need automation;" know how to analyze operations and task flow to operate a library or information service of any general kind. This is a combination of management and technology skills.

structures of information and communication in different fields and specialties -- not the picky details of each field, but the "meta" structural approach -- what are the different kinds of ways that information and creative communication evolve in various social and professional contexts, and how do we navigate among them library and information services as part of broader social institutions of education and communication

That's a start. We are in a field that blends the disciplines of communication studies, the sociology of knowledge, education, public policy and management.
It seems to me that those cut across the mundane tasks of our daily work in a variety of settings. If all we want to do is order books or search databases, then it's quite true that we don't need a master's level program. We must have specialties, of course -- but we absolutely must generalize from those to take the broader view of the profession, and library school is the time and place to begin (you can always learn new reference tools on the job, but how often do you debate philosophy and social policy?).

Professionalism in Librarianship

Bill Drew wrote this great e-mail on the subject of professionalism in librarianship:

A recent spate of negative comments on this list and statements by our incoming ALA president have gotten me thinking about what professionalism in librarianship in the 21st Century means to me. Here are some thoughts on this:

1. Willingness to help in a positive manner.
2. Participation in national, state, and local library organizations.
3. Publication in scholarly and popular journals in libraryland and beyond.
4. Participation in public discussion in ways that advance the profession.
5. Participation in continuing education (conferences, course work, independent reading/study).
6. Willingness to try new technologies and modes of communications.
7. Above all else, getting information to our patrons in a timely manner when and where they need it in the format they can use.


Wilfred (Bill) Drew
Associate Librarian, Systems and Reference Morrisville State College Library
E-mail: mailto:drewwe@morrisville.edu
AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4
BillDrew.Net: http://billdrew.net/
Wireless Librarian: http://people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless/
Library: http://library.morrisville.edu/
SUNYConnect: http://www.sunyconnect.suny.edu/
My Blog: http://babyboomerlibrarian.blogspot.com/
"To teach is to learn twice." - Joseph Joubert