UT and Google Partnership Will Put Books Online
Admit it, the hype is over and now you are just going to have to face it: for the rest of your life, you will use Google.
Odds are, if you are the least bit tech-savvy, you use Google for email, maps, searching the web for news, images, video or our favorite feature, free SMS. The youth of America (who are being raised with google for brains) fully understand that the industry giant has become a facet of their everyday life -- so much so that if present trends continue, you may be looking at a machine that might even make the personal computer obsolete.
Today, The University of Texas at Austin joined the distinguished list of universities (including Harvard, Stanford, Oxford) in creating "a broad book digitization project." This pro-bono partnership with Google aims to digitally transfer at least one million hard-copy volumes from the UT Library System to an online database. There are currently over 9 million volumes in 13 physical locations at UT.
Once the volumes are transferred, all books can be found using Google Book Search, enabling you to casually browse and read most of the universities' public documents. The Google Books Library Project, started in December of 2004 and will take years to complete. Although the product of this transfer process won't be seen any time soon, controversy is already brewing over copyright laws, intellectual property and the true effectiveness online books play--especially in the academic community.
If a book is protected by copyright, the author or publisher can wish to not have their piece included or the reader would only be able to view basic background information, maybe a few lines of the text and information about where they can borrow or buy. The university is certainly familiar with this kind of debate; most recently, last year when an idea was introduced that would place all of a professor's lectures online. Proffesor's cried copyright, while many students saw it as a reasonable supplement for already expensive classes.
This is seemingly a win/win all around--Google gets to bump-up its database of online books free of charge. UT becomes an exemplar for preservation, progress and trying to look hip. Authors' and publishers' works gain a more expansive audience. All the while, Google does what it does best, helping a young and impatient public get relevant information, quicker.
And if UT ever teams up with YouTube, then we'll know we're too old.
Image of soon to be vacant Perry Castaneda Library by xgray.
