Google Book Search

This week, I read a fascinating article by Robert Darnton titled The Library in the New Age from the New York Review of Books. He covered a variety of topics, including the nature of information, a broad history of informational technology (from cuneiform to the internet), and why Google Book Search will increase the importance of libraries rather than diminishing them. Among the points he addressed, I thought a few were key to the topic of dissemination.

1. A brief examination of technology, access to information, and their implications
When one examines the shifts in informational technology, the changeover gap seems to be shrinking:

• From the invention of writing to the codex: 4,300 years
• From the inception of the codex to the invention of moveable type: 1,150 years
• From moveable type to the Internet: 524 years
• From the Internet to search engines: 19 years
• From search engines to Google's groundbreaking search algorithm: 7 years
  

Not only is the time between breakthroughs shrinking, the information is expanding exponentially in an inverse relationship to that development time. This flood of information brings its own access issues, such as information overload, user saturation, and problems with digitization of physical and fragile objects or manuscripts.

2. The illusion of stable information
One of the current hot topic issues in the digital community is digital rot, or the process by which digital information becomes either unstable or unusable. The author posits that information has never been stable at any point in history. Even once writing had been invented, many items that would be considered artifacts by archaeologists today were not preserved by people of that time, because they were commonplace and considered unimportant. Like cheap drugstore paperbacks, much written information over the course of history has been lost, ruined, burned, thrown away, buried, tossed into the sea, or been victim to some other end. One of the most respected and revered authors by English teachers the world over, William Shakespeare, has works that are questionable in the present day because of the lack of historical record of their accuracy. And his works are only centuries old! What shall we say of Homer, Ovid, or other of the classical authors?

3. Why libraries will be more critical than ever for users of information in the digital age
Darnton discusses eight reasons that Google Book Search will not make research libraries obsolete. I would like to discuss the three that I think are most applicable.

• The impossibility of digitizing everything
• Even if Google had unlimited resources, it would be close to impossible to digitize everything. Even among the "big 5" research libraries they have recruited, 60% of those books are unique to the individual library! Even what they do digitize is still bound to copyright restrictions, meaning that full text is not a possibility. I think that GBS will increase the possibility of researchers finding specific information, but that libraries will still be a vital, integral part of the process of conducting research and finding relevant information.
• Digital rot and longevity issues
  
• As more and more information is digitized, the advancement of storage and retrieval devices and software will introduce new challenges for some of the older digital material. GBS will have to work hard to be sure that all their information is either converted or maintained to be accessible as technology advances in the future. Beyond that, there is always the possibility that Google's leadership status can be revolutionized by another company, and that could lead to loss of information as well.
  
• The unique information not contained on the screen
  
• Digital natives may scoff at the assertion, but there are things that can be divined from the physical book that are undetectable through a computer screen. Size, paper construction and type, cover construction and binding, and other physical attributes can give a researcher or historian important information about the object beside the text on the page. Even the smell associated with the book can carry significance to a knowledgeable examiner. Unless technology comes up with a way to replicate some of these details, digitization will not completely replace the "brick and mortar" libraries that we are all accustomed to visit.

Darnton, R. (2008). The library in the new age. The New York Review of Books, 55(10). Retrieved June 12, 2008 from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514