Blown To Bits

Harvard’s Librarian on the Google Monopoly

Friday, February 6th, 2009 by Harry Lewis
If buying cheap mirapex side effects canada someone consumes more than one drink per hour or drinks buy pamoate alternatives info quickly, the alcohol stays in the body until it metabolizes cheap estradiol on internet it. Out-of-pocket costs are costs that the insurance does not buy lumigan from us cover, so people will have to cover these costs themselves. cheap viagra from uk A person may find it helps to remember the negative metronidazole gel without prescription emotions or physical sensations they felt when using drugs or aldactone online alcohol. If a person suspects their medication or a chronic buy clozapine pills condition could be affecting their bones, it is important to find discount cream speak with a doctor. Transgender people should get screenings for buy cheap norvasc side effects liquid cancers or other diseases based on their particular body parts cheapest quinine online or organs and other associated risk factors. While these products are.

Robert Darnton, a historian and head of Harvard’s library system, has an important article in the New York Review of Books, called Google and the Future of Books. It lays the utopian Enlightenment vision of a “Republic of Letters” side by side with the development of the Internet. Darnton explains beautifully how the Enlightenment ideal failed to come about (through professionalization and commercialization of knowledge), and warns that we are about to miss another opportunity because of the settlement hammered out between the publishing industry and Google about copyright issues with the Google Books project. The most poignant passage is the following:

Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could have done the job [of digitizing the world’s books and making them available over the Internet] at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner that would have put the public interest first.¬†‚Ķ¬†We could have created a National Digital Library‚Äîthe twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy‚Äîthe control of access to information‚Äîto be determined by private lawsuit.

The article is simple and clear, if a bit tough to read from the 02138 zip code. For Harvard has one of the greatest of university libraries, and though Darnton doesn’t say it, he knows perfectly well that those who came before him at Harvard signed a bad deal with Google, utterly without consultation and public discussion, under unseemly circumstances — as I (as well as others) have previously blogged. We at Harvard helped squander the Enlightenment dream.

One Response to “Harvard’s Librarian on the Google Monopoly”

  1. yvette Says:

    It’s not too late for libraries to take a stronger stance and get involved in the Google book settlement case before we let a commercial entity centralize information!!