Google's digitization of millions of books from five top research libraries has raised questions about the future of libraries in a digital world, but information authorities at Tufts do not feel threatened by the Internet behemoth's venture.
Google's project, formerly called Google Print and now called Google Book Search, involves scanning all of the books from the New York Public Library, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, and the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and making them available online.
"Basically, we don't think that it is a bad thing," said Laura Walters, assistant director for teaching and research at Tufts' Tisch Library. "Anything that's online that is academic is just a supplement to our print resources."
The Google project is scanning all out-of-copyright texts-that is, those produced prior to 1923-as well as small selections of works published after 1923. Google also announced an opt-out policy for publishers of in-copyright works in August 2005.
Because of this measure, Walters said that Google's project might actually increase circulation of some volumes in library collections.
"When you do a search in Google, there will be a link to libraries that own the text," Walters said. "Let's say the book you want is post-1923 ... you can go to Tufts and get it."
Tufts has not been asked to participate in the Google Book Search. Instead, Walters said, Tisch would prefer to "look at what we own that is not owned by places that are taking part in Google Book Search."
Unique collections at Tufts include the Bolles Collection - an archive of old maps and documents of London - and the Boston Streets collection - which combines data from Boston city directories, images from the Bostonian Society's photo collection and maps.
"One of the collections that has been getting a lot of attention lately is the Edward R. Murrow Collection," Sauer said. "The production team working on 'Good Night, and Good Luck' did a lot of research here."
All of the photographs from that collection are currently available online, as well as a catalogue of all of the items, ranging from letters with Eleanor Roosevelt to phonographs.
Classics Professor Gregory Crane would like to see Tufts join the Open Content Alliance (OCA) so that researchers from anywhere in the world would be able to access the University's unique collections.
Crane is editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library, housed in Tufts' Classics Department. Perseus began as a digital library for classics material, but currently hosts a plethora of documents for the study of ancient Greece, Rome and medieval England, as well as other collections.
Crane said that as of October the database, "has served over 11 million Web pages to 500,000 unique users, so we definitely reach far beyond [Tufts]."
The OCA's website describes the organization as "a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content." This content will soon be available on the OCA website and will be included in Yahoo! indexes.
"Google [is] building itself its own library-anyone will have access to that library, but Google will have unique access to it," Crane said. "The idea of the OCA is that it is different: a common, shared library to which all will have access."
Crane would like to make all of the Perseus content he is legally allowed to release available through the OCA, but "it seems like the OCA wants institutions to be members and so, to some extent, I'm waiting to see what Tufts does," Crane said.
Crane has already spoken with several library representatives, including Walters, Digital Collections and Archives (DCA) Director Anne Sauer and Chief Information Officer Mely Tynan. He said they have expressed interest in the OCA, but it is not clear who would make the decision for Tufts to become a member.
"Larry Bacow wants to make our intellectual content as freely available as possible," Crane said. "Once that decision has been made, the OCA is not a big policy decision."
The decision to make Tufts a member would mean that Tufts' unique collections on the DCA would become much more widely accessible.
All of the content available on the DCA is currently open to the public, but Sauer said that, "we haven't done a lot of PR [outside the University] because we're such a small group. There are five staff members in the office, and we serve the entire university."
Crane believes that the explosion of online resources will rapidly change the role of the library in the coming years.
"We have to ask questions like, will we have the same jobs, the same number of people [in libraries]? People could start to wonder why they have a print library," he said. "If we start talking about things now, looking at a 5 or 10 year horizon, then we can start thinking in terms of retraining."
"Things like Wikipedia, Google and Google Library ... seem to me to have arguably created a much more active, inquiring, curious intellectual life than was feasible before," he added.
While Tisch does not view Google Book Search as a threat, Walters said she has serious reservations about the efficiency of the project.
"The Google search is going to be a disaster." she said, giving the example of a scholar researching French prisons in the 19th century. Someone who typed those keywords into Google Book Search would get hits for every time that those keywords were mentioned in the full text of a book.
"You would get thousands of hits from books that really have nothing to do with the topic. My concern as a librarian is that people will not be able to find the core of what they need because of the lack of subject-specific searching," Walters said, adding that most of the libraries participating in the project are building their own engines to search their online files for better retrieval.
Walters said that she thinks protests and lawsuits against Google Book Search "are shortsighted on the part of publishers," since placing small portions of copyrighted material online could increase sales by allowing readers preview the material.
"Tisch is for anything that will open access to books," she said.
Google Book Search and the Internet as a whole have sparked debate over the future of libraries, but Walters insists that Tisch and other libraries feel unthreatened by the Google project.
"We still think that academic monographs need to be read from beginning to end, and we don't know anybody who wants to read an entire book online," she said.
Walters said that books "are still incredibly important" and that the libraries participating in Google Book Search are doing so as a means of preservation.
