Library materials given to search engines

The Associated Press/SAN FRANCISCO

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
AP Business Writer

 

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8AOV0G00.htm?campaign_id=apn_tech_down

A leading library supplier is allowing the Internet's top search engines to index its previously restricted reference material, hoping to open a new online avenue that transports more traffic to local libraries.

About 5,000 public, academic and military libraries nationwide are participating in the pilot program announced Thursday by Thomson Gale, a Farmington Hills, Mich.-based company that provides electronic versions of articles, encyclopedic references and 18th-century books.

Many of those materials have been available for years through the individual Web sites operated by libraries that subscribe to Thomson Gale's data.

While the information has proven useful to library patrons aware of the online resources, it hasn't been helping the masses who flock to search engines as their first stop for research and education, said Thomson Gale President Gordon Macomber.

"There are millions of Americans who are entitled to have access to this high-quality information, but have no earthly idea how to get to it," Macomber said. "We think this (project) will help liberate the information."

To make its library services more accessible, Thomson Gale is permitting the Internet's most popular search engines, including industry leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., to include the material in their search indexes for the first time.

The search engines began scanning the Thomson Gale data Thursday, but it could be awhile before the material starts to emerge in search results.

Both Google and Yahoo have been eager to include more library resources in their search indexes.

Mountain View-based Google last year launched an ambitious project to scan millions of books into its index, raising copyright objections from some publishers. Meanwhile, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has been working with the Library of Congress to scan previously inaccessible documents.

Not everyone will be able to view the Thomson Gale material when it turns up in a search result. Reading the full text requires membership in one of the participating libraries. That requirement threatens to frustrate search engine users whose local libraries either don't subscribe to Thomson Gale data or aren't participating in the pilot project. Thomson Gale plans to keep increasing the number of libraries as the test progresses.

Search engine indexes contain billions of Web pages, meaning the library results will be mixed in with a jumble of commercial sites. For those that want to confine their searches to library material, Thomson Gale is running a specialty site, www.accessmylibrary.com, to process requests.

Thomson Gale's cooperation with search engines could be a boon to libraries, said Clara Bohrer, president of the Public Library Association.

"It's a real positive step," Bohrer said. "Most libraries just haven't been able to get the word out about all the wonderful resources that they have online. Hopefully, people will start finding more information through these searches and say, 'Gee, maybe I better go check out my local library's Web site and to see what else I can find there.' "

Libraries that don't subscribe to Thomson Gale's services -- either because they can't afford it or don't think their members would use the material -- might feel shortchanged, Bohrer said.

Thomson Gale is owned by Thomson Corp., a Toronto-based company that earned $1 billion last year on revenue of $8.1 billion.