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THE STATE OF ONLINE ARCHIVES AND WHAT THEY MEAN FOR ACADEME
Three
speakers were featured in this interactive panel: Daniel
Greenstein, associate vice provost for scholarly
information, California Digital Library, University of
California; Adam M. Smith, group business product manager,
Google Book Search and Google Scholar; and Danielle Tiedt,
general manager, Windows Live Premium Search, Microsoft.
Google, the company, has a goal to make
the full text of the world’s books and scholarly information
indexed and searchable through Google Book Search and Google
Scholar, both of which are currently in Beta, Smith said.
"Our mission is to organize the world of information and
make it universally accessible and useful."
Google Book Search
Smith explained that only five to ten percent
of all books that have been printed throughout time are
still actively in print, and 20 percent of U.S. library
holdings are in the public domain. So, in effect, Google
Book Search is in the process of trying to scan about 25 to
30 percent of the world’s total number of books ever
published. The Book Search engine basically allows users to
see a few short excerpts from those books under copyright
law and more content from those books in the public domain.
"What we are really doing is creating a discovery tool for
books," said Smith. "Where copyright law allows, we will
allow users to access more, and where it does not, we will
only show what effectively is an enhanced card catalogue."
Google Book Search has been operating through a partnership
program with "thousands of publishers worldwide to get their
books that are in print, make the full text searchable, and
allow users to discover them and sample a few pages from
each of those texts."
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a lot like the basic Google
search engine that we all know, said Smith. Through
partnerships with scholarly publishers who have already gone
through the process of digitizing their publications, Google
has been able to allow users to search through a great deal
of scholarly information as easily as they do with the
popular Google search engine. In addition, "we can actually
link to a library’s licensed resources," Smith noted. "By
using link resolvers and other technologies, we are able to
show users a direct link into their institution’s licensed
resources, so that they are able to access it without having
to log-in again. We are currently working with over 1,000
libraries in this regard."
Microsoft’s Agenda
Tiedt emphasized Microsoft’s
business plans for its search engine services. Within its
basic Live Search web-based service, Microsoft also has two
Beta projects, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic.
"The main difference between the Google and Microsoft
approaches is that we are focusing on a much more targeted
sample size [of search results], so our mission is to answer
questions better," said Tiedt. In short, Microsoft is
analyzing how its users conduct online queries and working
on developing methods and functions that would ultimately
bring more authoritative and trusted content to answer those
queries. (Editor’s Note: I think it can safely be said
that all of the major search engine companies are conducting
similar research to some degree.)
Libraries and Access
The California
Digital Library’s Greenstein gave both Google and Microsoft
a pat on the back for their work in the the field of book
and scholarly search. "The whole aim of the academic library
is to make information available in support of scholarship.
Google and Microsoft have generated a lot of enthusiasm
among libraries," Greenstein said.
He went on to say that mass digitization,
in general, has generated useful lines of discussion around
what an academic search should look like and how scholars
visualize information. "What do our scholars want to do when
they have access to these vast stores of information? We
need to begin to explore what the future of scholarship
looks like."
In August, the University of California libraries
(comprised of 10 libraries and 34 million volumes) announced
their partnership with Google to digitize books from the
libraries’ collections. Other institutions that have joined
Google Book Search include the University of Michigan,
Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University,
the New York Public Library, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Virginia, and the
University Complutense of Madrid.
Google Book Search
http://books.google.com/
About academic library partners
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html
Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
Windows Live Academic
http://academic.live.com/
Windows Live Search Book
http://books.live.com/
California Digital Library
www.cdlib.org/
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