Library Google Research Articles

Join the Conversation: Show Your Library's Google Scholar and Book Search Expertise

SUMMARY Offering workshops on Google Scholar and Google Book Search, and including them in library instruction sessions, gives librarians a new opportunity to connect with their user communities. By adopting and marketing these and similar databases, librarians can open up new avenues of research for their users, both in Google's domain and in the realm of more traditional library research.

Google

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Maurice Saatchi, ‘The strange death of modern advertising’, Financial Times, 22 June 2006. 2. Robert O. Keohane & Joseph S. Nye, ‘Power and Interdependence in the Information Age’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 5 (1998), p. 84. 3. Thomas. L Friedman, ‘Is Google God?’, The New York Times, 29 June 2003. 4. Bill Thomson, ‘Is Google too powerful?’, BBC, 21 February 2003. 5. Robert W. McChesney, ‘The New Global Media’, in David Held & Anthony McGrew (eds.), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, 2nd edn (Polity, 2002), p. 260. 6. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell, 1996). 7. See Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 8. Sergey Brin & Larry Page, ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’, Computer Networks, Vol. 30, Nos 1-7 (1998), http://www-db.stanford.edu/∼backrub/google.html (accessed 24 August 2006). 9. S. A. Mathieson, ‘Google – Swiss Army Knife for Hackers?’, Infosecurity Today, November–December (2005), pp. 39–41. 10. Saul Hansell, ‘Yahoo is unleashing a new way to turn ad clicks into ka-ching’, The New York Times, 8 May 2006. 11. Google, ‘Corporate Information–Technology Overview’, http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/corporate/tech.html (accessed 24 June 2006). 12. Quoted in Steve Lohr, ‘Microsoft and Google grapple for supremacy as stakes escalate’, The New York Times, 10 May 2006. 13. Figures are from Danny Sullivan, ‘Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings’, 22 August 2006, at http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156451 (accessed 22 August 2006); Bill Tancer, ‘Google's weekly search numbers’, Hitwise Intelligence, 22 August 2006, http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/08/googles_weekly_search_numbers.html (accessed 23 August 2006). 14. Google, ‘Company Overview’, http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/corporate/index.html (accessed 20 June 2006). 15. According to a recent survey, 56.3 per cent of internet users in the USA make use of search engines at least once a day. See iProspect, Search Engine User Attitudes Survey, April–May 2004, http://www.iprospect.com/premiumPDFs/iProspectSurveyComplete.pdf#search=‘iProspect%20search%20engine%20attitude%20survey ’ (accessed 23 August 2006). 16. Google, ‘Corporate Information: Features Overview’ (2004), http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/features.html (accessed 20 June 2006). 17. The results used in the comparison were produced by the author's own search for the query term ‘China’, using three search engines including Google (www.google.com), Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and Microsoft MSN (www.msn.com) conducted on 23 August 2006. 18. Deborah Fallows, Search Engine Users, Pew Internet & American Life Project, 23 January 2005, http://www.pewinternet.org/ (accessed 23 August 2006). 19. David Reid, ‘French answer to Google Library’, BBC, 24 June 2005. 20. Rhys Blakely, ‘Chirac wants a rival to beat Google’, The Times, 29 April 2006. 21. As a brainchild of Jacques Chirac and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Quaero was conceived in April 2005. 22. ‘Support for EU “digital library”’, BBC, 4 May 2005. 23. For more details about the Gallica project (http://gallica.bnf.fr/), see Reid, ‘French Answer to Google Library’. 24. Peter Sayer, ‘Google France Loses Appeal in AdWords Trademark Dispute’, 17 March 2005, at http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/03/17/HNgooglefranceadwords_1.html (accessed 12 September 2006). 25. BBC, ‘Support for EU “Digital Library”’. 26. ‘Quaero's challenge: I search, therefore I am’, Financial Times, 23 January 2006. 27. Reid, ‘French answer to Google Library’. 28. Bobbie Johnson, ‘The question: does France really need its own search engine?’, The Guardian, 27 April 2006. 29. The COPA was struck down by the Supreme Court for its potential to violate adults' online freedom of speech. 30. Financial Times, 15 March 2006. 31. Hansell, ‘Yahoo is unleashing a new way’. 32. Associated Press, 24 January 2006. 33. Google, ‘Technology Overview’, at http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html (accessed 20 June 2006). 34. The search was conducted by the author on the 2 March 2006 using the standard version (www.google.com) and the Chinese version (www.google.com.cn) of Google search. 35. Original wording displayed by Google search was in Chinese characters. Pinyin and translation by the author. 36. John B. Thomson, ‘The Globalization of Communication’, in Held & McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader, pp. 246–59. 37. Jonathan D. Aronson, ‘Causes and Consequences of the Communications and Internet Revolution’, in John Baylis & Steve Smith (eds.), The Globalisation of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 641.

The Google Mass Digitisation Project at Oxford

For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library's existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, 'boutique' digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian's collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has Web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15th century.

Impact of the Internet on the services aspect of the STM publishing business

We have heard at this conference many presentations about the tremendous changes in information technology, in navigation across information sources, in archiving, and it is clear that there are many innovative forces and actors in the sector of science information and publishing. I would like to speak with you this afternoon about my own observations as to the impact of these innovations and innovators on traditional science publishers. Although I am a lawyer for a publishing company, I am not going to be speaking about legal issues per se (the other lawyers on this panel no doubt will cover many important legal issues), although of course I am happy to answer questions about the legal implications of what I have to say. One of the most interesting things about the Internet is the way it can revolutionize roles in any information or distribution chain, especially if the “product” is something that can be inherently digital and delivered online (as opposed to selling cars). Equally important is the increasing ability to create online communities and to facilitate direct communications among previously disparate groups. In the STM publishing sector, customer libraries who traditionally bought materials for their local community can create (and are creating) digital collections for access by consumers outside the traditional user group (whether through licenses or sometimes controversially, as with the Google Library project, without licenses!). So customers have become distributors. I have a few examples on the screen of libraries and library organizations involved in such ventures such as the British Library and Subito. Similarly, subscription agents, traditionally distributors of scholarly journals, can provide extensive back-office functions for publishers and have become part of the outsourcing of “business” aspects of publishing. This shot of EBSCO shows some of their capability in this area. Swets and other agents are also providing greater e-resources of many types. Researchers and research institutions are also becoming publishers – actually this is nothing new, most scholarly publishing started at universities and institutions and much is still done directly by those institutions – but the Internet clearly provides greater visibility and inter-connectedness for new journals and new journal-like repositories. We have also seen funding agencies act more like publishers. The DSpace and Southampton projects are good examples of institutional repositories. Stanford’s High Wire Press “spin-off” a good example of a collaborative effort to create a hosting platform. One important strategic question for traditional publishers, in the light of these changing roles of stakeholders in the scholarly communication chain, is whether and to what extent the publishers need to change their roles and provide greater or different value to their communities of users and customers. We have heard during this conference some scholarly publishers describe their own strategic approaches, and my own view is that STM publishing is one of the most innovative sector in all of publishing and in many respects leads the pack of copyright content industries. STM journal publishers have had

Alexandria burned – securing knowledge access in the age of Google

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the legal implications presented by the Google Library Project which entails the digitization of the collections of five prominent libraries.Design/methodology/approachThis paper focuses on knowledge access and the effect digitization will have on the availability of books heretofore available only in analog form and in libraries. This paper does not address “e‐books” or similar electronic publishing formats but instead analyzes the process of digitizing hard copy books in their entirety, making the content available for searching online, and the copyright, private property, and antitrust issues that will confront a online commercial library.FindingsWhile conducting research for this paper, it was found that the internet space opens up as many problems as opportunities. The copyright laws have been well balanced over the years to reflect the interests of the copyright holder and the public. Commercial entities, in particular, internet search engines, are entering into licensing and other contractual arrangements which may limit public access to works that would otherwise be available for use under the existing fair use, first sale, and library exemption regimes.Originality/valueWhat may be considered original is the emphasis on the contract between Google and the University of Michigan's “cooperative agreement.” It is unusual that such a document is available for public scrutiny and provides a window into the thinking of both parties. Google, with extraordinary assets available to it, may be able to unfairly skew knowledge access in a way unimaginable in a traditional library setting. Characterizing the legal relationship between Google, the libraries, and the public may not be new, but the approach should afford additional insight into the ongoing hard copy/electronic copy debate.

Google Book Search: Fair Use, Fair Dealing and the Case for Intermediary Copying

This article examines the legality of Google's Library Project under U.S. and U.K. copyright law. The Library Project provides a useful example of the divergence in approach to copyright exceptions in these two jurisdictions. In particular, whilst Google's plans have generated a great deal of controversy, it at least has an arguable case under U.S. law that its use is fair use. No analogous argument can be made under U.K. law. The main purpose of this article is to highlight this distinction and to suggest that U.K. copyright law is failing to adequately account for transformations in the mode and manner in which individuals interact with information. Following a brief introduction in part 1, part 2 begins by explaining how Google's 'Book Search' program (formerly 'Google Print') operates and briefly describing the two lawsuits issued against the 'Library Project' aspect of the service by the Author's Guild and a number of prominent publishers. Part 3 offers a preliminary assessment of whether Google's activities are lawful under U.S. copyright law. In attempting to answer this question, Google's case is presented with a 'positive spin'; not in an effort to predict the outcome of any future trial, but rather to illustrate that Google can reasonably argue that its use is a privileged one. Part 4 then considers how Google would fare under U.K. law. The conclusion, unlike the U.S. law analysis, suggests that Google would have little chance of success if its case was being heard in the U.K. Part 5 asks whether this is a desirable result and concludes that, given recent advances in the technological landscape, it is not. This conclusion is based, in particular, on Professor Zittrain's concept of 'generativity' and Professor Frischmann's economic theory of infrastructure. Finally, Part 6 describes how U.K. copyright law could accommodate uses such as Google's within its existing scheme of exceptions. A specific defence for 'intermediary' copying premised on the 'temporary copies' exception recently enacted as section 28A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 is outlined, and alternatively a new defence of 'fair dealing for informational purposes' is proposed.

Upholding Bodley’s vision: the Google mass digitisation project at Oxford

For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library’s existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, ‘boutique’ digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th-century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian’s collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the Project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15 th century.