Happy Valentine’s Day to my fellow metadata lovers!
I just finished reading On Being in Bed with Google and May I Speak Openly about Mass Digitization. I was particularly fascinated by On Being in Bed with Google.
First of all, it ties nicely to my early post about needing to convince shareholders of the economic viability for any large scale open access endeavor. When reading this article, I imagined the library administrators at UM meeting with the school’s Board and laying out the magnitude of this digital project. I am sure the fact that Google was providing the service for free was a major selling point. Secondly, I began thinking about exactly how “free” the service was. There had to have some sort of cost UM for partnering with Google on such a massive project.
Courant wrote, “Our only financial outlay is for storage and the cost of providing library services to our users. Anyone who searches U-M’s library catalog,Mirlyn, can access the scanned files via our MBooks interface”.
But, what does the cost of providing library services mean? Does that include the metadata records for all of the digitized objects or is Google providing those with the scanned files? If Google is providing the metadata records, then I guess that makes them a bunch of metaluvas too!
You’re right, “providing library services” does seem pretty vague a description! I wonder what it entails–because it can be pretty extensive!
Apologies for this dated link to Courant’s blog. The undertaking that he’s describing in 2007 has now evolved into the HathiTrust, a significant operation based in part on the scans arising from the Google Books project. The HathiTrust involves a suite of services including Bib records. See: http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/communityacademiclibraries/890917-419/unlocking_hathitrust_inside_the_librarians.html.csp