Re: [InetBib] [Fwd: [AMIA-L] FW: Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web]

[delin@xxxxxx (Delin, Peter)]

Delin, Peter schrieb:
> Heute in der New York Times.
> Viele Grüße
> Peter Delin
 Leider fehlt wohl der Anhang. Hier folgt er als als Nachtrag:

NY Times
10/22/2007
Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web

Ann Johansson for The New York Times
Workers scan books for the Internet Archive. Its founder conceived the 
Open Content Alliance to distribute library books online.

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: October 22, 2007
Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and 
Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are 
put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital 
collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, 
are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit 
effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, 
which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search 
services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it 
converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is 
making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the 
resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more 
useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned 
again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a 
cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious 
financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started 
in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the 
New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, 
Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books 
from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library 
and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and 
nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global 
repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.

Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to 
hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some 
libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to 
dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that 
dominance for commercial gain.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid, an 
adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of 
California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other 
by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”

Last month, the Boston Library Consortium of 19 research and academic 
libraries in New England that includes the University of Connecticut and 
the University of Massachusetts, said it would work with the Open 
Content Alliance to begin digitizing the books among the libraries’ 34 
million volumes whose copyright had expired.

“We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want 
to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from 
it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, 
which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal 
library of John Adams.

Mr. Margolis said his library had spoken with both Google and Microsoft, 
and had not shut the door entirely on the idea of working with them. And 
several libraries are working with both Google and the Open Content 
Alliance.

Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted 
that the company’s deals with libraries were not exclusive. “We’re 
excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign 
many more,” Mr. Smith said.

“The powerful motivation is that we’re bringing more offline information 
online,” he said. “As a commercial company, we have the resources to do 
this, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits users, publishers, 
authors and libraries. And it benefits us because we provide an improved 
user experience, which then means users will come back to Google.”

The Library of Congress has a pilot program with Google to digitize some 
books. But in January, it announced a project with a more inclusive 
approach. With $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the 
library’s first mass digitization effort will make 136,000 books 
accessible to any search engine through the Open Content Alliance. The 
library declined to comment on its future digitization plans.

The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the 
founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 
with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The 
group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions, 
including the Smithsonian Institution.

Although Google is making public-domain books readily available to 
individuals who wish to download them, Mr. Kahle and others worry about 
the possible implications of having one company store and distribute so 
much public-domain content.

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one 
corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have 
handed too much control to a private entity,” Mr. Kahle said.

The Open Content Alliance, he said, “is fundamentally different, coming 
from a community project to build joint collections that can be used by 
everyone in different ways.”

Mr. Kahle’s group focuses on out-of-copyright books, mostly those 
published in 1922 or earlier. Google scans copyrighted works as well, 
but it does not allow users to read the full text of those books online, 
and it allows publishers to opt out of the program.

Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005, as did 
Yahoo, which also has a book search project. Google also spoke with Mr. 
Kahle about joining the group, but they did not reach an agreement.

A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a 
book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines 
other than Microsoft’s.

“Unlike Google, there are no restrictions on the distribution of these 
copies for academic purposes across institutions,” said Jay Girotto, 
group program manager for Live Book Search from Microsoft. Institutions 
working with Microsoft, he said, include the University of California 
and the New York Public Library.

Some in the research field view the issue as a matter of principle.
Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has made 
several grants to libraries for digital conversion of books, said that 
several institutions approached by Google have spoken to his 
organization about their reservations. “Many are hedging their bets,” he 
said, “taking Google money for now while realizing this is, at best, a 
short-term bridge to a truly open universal library of the future.”

The University of Michigan, a Google partner since 2004, does not seem 
to share this view. “We have not felt particularly restricted by our 
agreement with Google,” said Jack Bernard, a lawyer at the university.

The University of California, which started scanning books with the Open 
Content Alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo in 2005, has added Google. Robin 
Chandler, director of data acquisitions at the University of 
California’s digital library project, said working with everyone helps 
increase the volume of the scanning.

Some have found Google to be inflexible in its terms. Tom Garnett, 
director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent 
natural history and botanical libraries that have agreed to digitize 
their collections, said he had had discussions with various people at 
both Google and Microsoft.

“Google had a very restrictive agreement, and in all our discussions 
they were unwilling to yield,” he said. Among the terms was a 
requirement that libraries put their own technology in place to block 
commercial search services other than Google, he said.

Libraries that sign with the Open Content Alliance are obligated to pay 
the cost of scanning the books. Several have received grants from 
organizations like the Sloan Foundation.

The Boston Library Consortium’s project is self-funded, with $845,000 
for the next two years. The consortium pays 10 cents a page to the 
Internet Archive, which has installed 10 scanners at the Boston Public 
LibraryOther members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
and Brown University.

The scans are stored at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and are 
available through its Web site. Search companies including Google are 
free to point users to the material.

On Wednesday the Internet Archive announced, together with the Boston 
Public Library and the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and 
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that it would start scanning 
out-of-print but in-copyright works to be distributed through a digital 
interlibrary loan system.