Au Courant

In a recent AP article about mass digitization at Michigan (available here via Salon), my colleague John Wilkin was amusingly misquoted as characterizing some comments of Brewster Kahle’s as “theoretical,” when John meant polemical.” John has a nice blog post on the on the subject, with responses and rejoinders from both Brewster and from […]

Today the University of Michigan Library is celebrating a significant milestone: We have just put the one millionth book digitized from our collections online. (I recommend clicking on the link. The page is pretty cool.) As far as I know Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its […]

Paul Duguid’s comment on an earlier post of mine gets to important issues that I expect to discuss repeatedly (although not repetitiously) in this space. Among the big questions that he raises are these two: (1) How good a job will Google Book Search do? (2) What are the consequences that flow from the answer […]

[This is a reposting of a comment I made in response to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s questions about my previous post. I am traveling, and can only produce brief answers to his questions now. Later this week I’ll get to most of the issues in more detail here.]
Let me start by reminding everyone that I do not […]

One of the things that surprises me most about reactions to the Google Library Project is that smart people whom I respect seem to think that the only reason that a university library would be involved with Google is because, in some combination, its leadership is stupid, evil, or at best intellectually lazy. To the […]