Googling Books ...

Two stories, by the Associated Press and Gary Price's report for SearchEngineWatch, emphasize that yesterday's announcements of agreements between Google and five major research libraries are five separate agreements. Only the University of Michigan and Stanford have agreed that Google is to scan all of their book collections. Oxford University will have Google scan all of its book holdings originally published before 1901. The New York Public Library will submit a small portion of its holdings no longer covered by copyright to googling. Harvard has agreed to submit only 40,000 volumes to Google and will make further decisions based on its assessment of how the process has worked.

"This is the day the world changes," said John Wilkin, a widely quoted University of Michigan librarian."It will be disruptive because some people will worry that this is the beginning of the end of libraries. But this is something we have to do to revitalize the profession and make it more meaningful." In retrospect, that seems overly dramatic. The Oxford, Harvard, and New York Public library agreements are fairly limited. Neither the Library of Congress nor any of the other great libraries of the world have yet joined the project. Somehow, it seems more appropriate to say that the world still changes one book and one day at a time.