Free Range Librarian reproduces a rip-roarin’ anti-Google rant:
The “deal” that research libraries have struck, behind closed doors (in good corporate style) with Google threatens to erase the lines between commerce and the remaining public sphere of human thought and creativity as embodied in the collected and organized products of print culture and this arrangement makes their immense collections both a global prop for the colonization of some of the last nooks and crannys of human endeavor by the quest for profit and a monument to the inescapability of and seamless domination by the profit motive. In the end, which one can already see around the corner approaching with the ever-escalating speed of the circulation of capital, it will create a situation in which culture is entirely held hostage by commercial interests whose life-cycles are driven by motives and influences which have nothing to do with the past and present aims of libraries (aims which will be twisted to suit the omni-commercialization of digitized information access a la Google).
I looked really hard for actual content in this rant, something solid that would give me pause. I didn’t find anything. I really did look.
For one thing, he obviously missed the bit where Google is giving the resulting electronic files back to the libraries for whatever uses they see fit. Google isn’t locking up jack squat, isn’t holding anything hostage. Believe me, I’m sensitive to this, because of experience. I don’t call Versaware evil for nothing; I was there. They were evil. This deal with Google? Not evil that I can see.
For another, apocalyptic much, dude? If we let the moneyed philistines in the library temple, all of human culture will be destroyed, I tell you, destroyed!
I’m sorry, I think there are many worse threats right now to the fabric of culture than a digitization deal with Google that leaves the resulting data in the hands of librarians who presumably know what to do with it. (Has Rosenzweig met any of the Michigan folks? I have. They’re dead smart. I’m quite willing to make the assumption they looked at this deal from every angle I have and a few I haven’t thought of, and still liked it. If Rosenzweig has a reason to think otherwise, I’d be happy to hear.)
Reality check? Digitization costs money. Google has it. We don’t. This can not get done at all, or can get done by Google. Google can spend its money on something evil, or they can spend it doing digitization. We object to the latter choices why exactly? Because Google dirties whatever it touches? Come on, grow up. Because, seriously, who else is going to do this? Publishers? Publishers are so freaking clueless they can’t even digitize their frontlists. Libraries? I say again, we have no money.
Reality check two? We leave digitization to the moneyed interests one way or another. Database aggregators (who all too often do a truly craptastic job of it). Publishers (ditto). Grants. If Google had handed the money over to the universities, would that solve Rosenzweig’s angst? (I bet it would, even though it’s the same damn money. My guess is that his real problem is feeling useless because somebody’s doing text digitization who isn’t a librarian. To which I say, I didn’t learn to do it as a librarian. Join the real world where lots of people are doing it, a few as effectively or more so than librarians.)
Reality check three? Speaking from a labor perspective, if we did take something like this on? We’d outsource the bulk of the work to the Philippines and India. You know that, I know that, we all know that. I dunno what Google’s up to, but my guess is that a lot more of the work will be done domestically, given that it involves new processes and procedures. Doesn’t that matter? (Does to me.)
Reality check four? We, cultural institutions such as libraries and museums, have been locking up and discarding as much culture as any commercial institution you care to name. Or hasn’t Rosenzweig been watching the museums charging out the nose for reproduction of images? Or hasn’t he noticed academic libraries shutting out the public? Or academic librarians arguing, $DEITY help us all, against open-access scholarly publishing on weird quasi-moral (and certainly moralistic) grounds?
I don’t object to the process of looking gift horses in the mouth. In fact, I have a few questions of my own. Is Google going to share any of its development and process innovations with the libraries? If not, then the libraries may well be getting a raw-ish sort of deal. Is Google going to add links to library bibliographic records for items it digitizes? It had better. (I mean, how not? But I don’t know.) Is Google going to pony up some endowment cash for the long-term maintenance of the libraries’ electronic collections? Google certainly should, because maintenance and preservation cost a good deal more than initial digitization.
But, see, these strike me as real questions. Rosenzweig’s? Sound like empty posturing. We can do better than that, I think. And we should.
