[Bilimsel Haber] INQ, NEWS, TCH, REV: Googlebooks reviewed

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Matthew Gilmore <dc-edit at mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Subject: INQ, NEWS, TCH, REV: Googlebooks reviewed


April 30, 2007
Google Books: Whats Not to Like?
http://blog.historians.org/articles/204/google-books-whats-not-to-like


By Robert Townsend

The Google Books project promises to open up a vast amount of older
literature, but a closer look at the material on the site raises real
worries about how well it can fulfill that promise and what its real
objectives might be.

Over the past three months I spent a fair amount of time on the site as
part of a research project on the early history of the profession, and
from a researchers point of view I have to say the results were deeply
disconcerting. Yes, the site offers up a number of hard-to-find works from
the early 20th entury with instant access to the text. And yes, for some
books it offers a useful keyword search function for finding a reference
that might not be in the index. But my experience suggests the project is
falling far short of its central promise of exposing the literature of the
world, and is instead piling istake upon mistake with little evidence of
basic quality control. The problems I encountered fit into three broad
categoriesthe quality of the scans is decidedly mixed, the information
about the books (the metadata in info-speak) is often erroneous, and the
public domain is curiously restricted.

Poor Scan Quality
My reading of the materials was not scientific or comprehensive, by any
means, but a significant number of the books I encountered included basic
scanning errors. For instance, the site currently offers a version of the
Report of the Committee of Ten from 1893 (the start of the great
curriculum chase for the secondary schools). It offers a catalog of
scanning errors, as Google has double-scanned pages (page 3 appears twice,
for instance), pulled in pages improperly so they are now unreadable (page
147 between page 164 and 166), and cut off some pages (page 146, for
example).

Ive digitized a number of the AHAs old publications and appreciate that
scanners dont always work as they should and pages can often get jammed.
But even fairly rudimentary quality controls should catch those problems
before they go live online. After years of implementing those kinds of
quality checks hereprecisely because friends in the library community took
me to task about their necessityI find it passing strange that so many
libraries are joining in Googles headlong rush to digitize without similar
quality requirements.

Faulty Metadata
Mistakes in Google Book Search Metadata
Beyond the fundamental quality of the scanning, a more significant problem
is the incredibly poor descriptive information attached to many of the
books on the site (the metadata). This is particularly evident in the
serial publications, where having the proper name and date of a
publication is particularly important. Take for example a volume of
History Teachers Magazine that is labeled as a volume of Social Studies
(the name the magazine took in 1934) and dated as published in 1953 (even
though it seems to be from 1917).

These kinds of problems have two unfortunate effects. First, it makes it
more difficult to place a particular work in time and thus actually locate
a particular item discovered by using Google Books. At the same time, in
many instances you will be unable to inspect public domain items more
closely, because the erroneous date places the information on the wrong
side of the copyright line.

Truncated Public Domain
These problems are exacerbated by Googles rather peculiar views on
copyright. While taking an expansive view of copyright for recent works,
it has taken a very narrow view about books that actually are in the
public domain. As I have always understood it (and the U.S. Copyright
Office confirms), works by the U.S. government are not eligible for U.S.
copyright protection. But Google locks all government documents published
after 1923 behind the same wall as any other copyrighted work. Among other
things, that locks up works that should be in the public domain, such as
the AHAs Annual Report (published by the Government Printing Office from
1890 to 1993) and circulars from the U.S. Bureau of Education. This
problem is exacerbated by the often errant data about when these materials
were publishedwhich places these works even further beyond reach.

For more than a year now, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and
media scholar at New York University, has been objecting that the rush to
digitize is moving far in advance of considered thought. His concerns
seemed rather abstract when I first heard them last year, but working with
Google Books over the past few months made his objections seem much more
tangible and worrying.

What particularly troubles me is the likelihood that these problems will
just be compounded over time. From my own modest experience here at the
AHA, I know how hard it is to go back and correct mistakes online when the
imperative is always to move forward, to add content and inevitably pile
more mistakes on top of the ones already buried one or two layers down.
With Google adding in more than 3,000 new books each day, the growth in
the number of mistakes seems that much higher.

The problem of quality control only exacerbates my most basic worry about
the larger rush to digitize every scrap of informationthat we are adding
to the pile much faster than the technology can advance to extract the
information in a useful or meaningful way. When I have asked people who
know a lot more about the technology than me about this problem, they tend
to wave their hand and mumble about brilliant scientists and technological
progress. Forgive me if I remain unconvinced. Even for someone fairly
proficient in Boolean search terms I find a lot of the results from Google
Books (and Google more generally) just page after page of useless and
irrelevant information. I find it increasingly hard to believe that Google
can add tens of thousands of additional books each month to the
information pilemany containing basic mistakes in content and metadataand
the information results will actually grow better over time.

So I have to ask, whats the rush? In Googles case the answer seems clear
enough. Like any large corporation with a lot of excess cash the company
seems bent on scooping up as much market share as possible, driving
competition off the board and increasing the number of people seeing (and
clicking on) its highly lucrative ads. But I am not sure why the rest of
us should share the companys sense of haste. Surely the libraries
providing the content, and anyone else who cares about a rich digital
environment, needs to worry about the potential costs of creating a
universal library that is filled with mistakes and an impenetrable smog of
information. Shouldnt we ponder the costs to history if the real libraries
take error-filled digital versions of particular books and bury the
originals in a dark archive (or the dumpster)? And what is the cost to
historical thinking if the only substantive information one can glean out
of Google is precisely the kind of narrow facts and dates that make
history classes such a bore? The future will be here soon enough. Shouldnt
we make sure we will be happy when we get there?

Matthew Gilmore
H-DC
list co-editor, web editor
dc-edit at mail.h-net.msu.edu
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~dclist/ [list website]
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/lists/subscribe.cgi?list=H-DC [subscribe to
H-DC]