It's true that we have buns in the oven that are promissing.
But it's also worth noting that HathiTrust mainly came about via the
Google partnership, and they have certain limitations on what they can
do with their scans that came out of the Google partnership (the current
vast majority), as a result of agreements with Google. For instance,
they can _not_ bulk re-distribute the digitized scans, not even of
public domain works. They also need to have security measures in place
on their website to prevent other people from conveniently bulk
downloading via scraping (notice how you can't download a complete PDF
of even a public domain work from HathiTrust? )
But don't get me wrong, HathiTrust is a very important project, and
under good stewardship. It's not like all is lost or something, we're
just at the _beginning_ of the history of the digitized book universe,
not at the end.
But I agree with Ethan that I hope that libraries in the future actually
consider their own interests when making deals with for-profit third
parties. Like, literally, take a moment to consider what your interests
ARE, the first step before making sure they are protected by the
contracts you sign. I get the feeling many libraries didn't even do that.
Jonathan
Roy Tennant wrote:
On 5/19/09 5/19/09 € 9:59 AM, "Ethan Gruber" <ewg4x...@gmail.com> wrote:
Google isn't a dumb company. They knew this would be the result all along.
The real losers here are the libraries, especially the ones that funded the
packaging and transport of their materials to the Google scanning centers
(because Google didn't pay for that, fyi) But hey, it looks good to be part
of such a prestigious group of libraries in partnering with Google to
deliver content freely* to the public!
*not free
Pardon my cynicism,
Ethan Gruber
I think that's an overly pessimistic assessment. There is a growing corpus
of freely available content being managed by the Hathi Trust[1], that
already numbers in the hundreds of thousands of volumes, and soon likely to
be over a million. Also, since government documents are included, there is a
surprising number of post-1923 public domain titles. So let's not rush to
throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Roy
[1] http://www.hathitrust.org/
