Comments on: “Less than perfect” is not always bad

By: Bernie Reilly

Bernie Reilly — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:50:37 +0000

Paul’s post points out the now undeniable benefits of the Google Books effort and other mass digitization projects. To position themselves to best exploit those benefits, libraries need as much information about the projects as they can get. Leetaru’s comparative study, though dated (isn’t everything?) is extremely useful in this regard.

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:05:31 +0000

> We can choose purity and perfection,
> and not permit any restrictions on
> the use of scans of public domain material

i’m surprised you would mention “restrictions”
concerning scans of public-domain material…

there are none. a scan of a public-domain book
is public-domain as well, per bridgeman v corel…

your lawyers may disagree. google’s too. fine.
sue me. it will tell the world where you stand…

but that’s all beside the point… because — a la
the long-time wisdom of michael hart — a scan
of a book is not an e-book. we want digital text.

digital text is far superior — in _every_ way — to a
scan-set; it’s more flexible and more informative,
and uses less bandwidth. the important question
facing digitization projects at this point in time is
how to correct the o.c.r. to get perfect digital text.
once we have that, the scans will just collect dust.

as head of one of the main libraries in the world
– a big leader in the move toward cyberlibraries –
you should know this, so it is astonishing when
you blog and fail to manifest such knowledge…

-bowerbird

By: No need to Free Our Libraries! « Feral Librarian

No need to Free Our Libraries! « Feral Librarian — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:58:58 +0000

[...] Au Courant and Chronicle of Higher [...]

By: apsed | Impression à la demande à uMich

apsed | Impression à la demande à uMich — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:44:27 +0000

[...] Books and the Open Content Alliance comparant Google Book Search et Open Content Alliance sur Au Courant, critiqué en [...]

By: Mary Murrell

Mary Murrell — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:08:37 +0000

It would be a real shame if people begin to take the Leetaru piece in First Monday as authoritative. It is riddled with errors, outdated information, and misinterpretations. I am a Berkeley anthropology PhD student doing research at the Internet Archive. I study both the Internet Archive’s book project carefully and am aware of much of the public information about Google’s project. Leetaru is wrong about how many books have been scanned by the Archive, the accessbility of books on its site, the cameras and software used in scanning, the supposed restrictions on use of scanned works, metadata practices, site searchability, and more. It would take a very long document to adequately rebut the piece.

Finally, his overall interpretation that somehow Google’s practices are more transparent than those of the Internet Archive is intriguingly counterintuitive but it doesn’t gibe with the facts (as I know them, at least). What’s worst about the piece is that it is essentially unfair to a small organization that is doing some pretty extraordinary things under very constrained circumstances. I wish he’d taken more time to understand the Internet Archive/OCA side of things. Had he, I think his conclusions would have been different.