SIVACRACY.NET: More on Google's Book Search "standards"

Liz Losh writes:

Indeed, it's hard to get straight answers from reading Google materials, but reviews in the venerable Search Engine Watch seem to indicate that Google might not even support library standards like Dublin Core or the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

As a rhetorician, I found the diction of Google's User Stories very strange, almost like heavily edited messages from the occupants of some authoritarian country or the members of some megalomaniacal cult. These cryptic yet canned testimonials earnestly emphasize either 1) how the typical Google Book Search user would be happily spending more money buying more books as a direct result of using this service or 2) how the user who wasn't a rapid-response book consumer would be mysteriously lacking in curiosity about the present, one narrowly interested in materials safely out of copyright and in the dusty territory of public domain, generally a harmless armchair historian/amateur genealogist.

Google's posting of these testimonials seems disingenuous, given how the digital generation wants online access to recent and complete files at minimal cost. It's like claiming that a visitor to Apple's iTunes would either merrily shell out $99 a song or would nostalgically content themselves with turn-of-the-last-century sheet music. Publishing such plainly unrealistic pap ignores the existence of conflicts between traditional cultures of knowledge and newer cultures of information that large-scale digitization efforts inevitably only exacerbate.

That's really the point of all this.

Michael Madison replied to my posting by asking whether libriarians should be the sole arbiters and organizers of our information ecosystem.

Of course not. We need search engines. And we all need better organizational skills (see tagging etc.) But librarians are the best trained and best skilled. And they have spent about a century debating the ethical, economic, political, and technological ramifications of classification, organization, and presentation.

Google has spent less than a decade generating traffic and collecting data on its users. Its search engine is great for the Web. It's horrible for books. Most of all, it's SECRET!

This is a real problem here, folks. Google is doing this all secretly. With no accountability.

We should not expect Google to do any differently. As Jardinero explained in the comments to a previous post, Google is a publicly traded corporation that should and will do what is best for its shareholders. And unless you are seriously lucky, you are not among them.

But libraries, espeically public university libraries, work for us. Or, they are supposed to. As I have said before, my biggest problem is with the libraries and universities that agreed to this horrible deal with Google. Google is only doing what we should expect it to: provide the cheapest possible service that will generate the greatest possible revenue.

Libraries and librarians are accountable. They are experienced. They are skilled. And they are open.

Comments

Recently, a public university library (the NCSU Libraries) implemented a commercial vendor’s software (Endeca ProFind™) to power a library catalog that combines the “best of both worlds” -- that is, the librarians’ expertise in cataloging and classification and the cutting-edge capabilities of this private company’s software, which powers e-commerce sites like Home Depot and Barnes & Noble.

Read the January 12, 2006 press release: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/news/libraries.php?p=1998&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Two of my colleagues here at the NCSU Libraries, Kim Duckett and Emily Lynema, recently made the following observations about our groundbreaking new catalog (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/ ) on NC State’s Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable listserv:

“Although the new interface has only been available for a few weeks, librarians see that students now find it much easier to discover the information resources they need. There are more opportunities for those ‘a-ha!’ moments that help a user connect their research need to the options at hand. It has become much easier to uncover primary materials for history papers, Spanish dictionaries for language courses, or the perfect book on a research topic. One student even remarked, ‘I've found myself searching the catalog just for fun, whereas before it was a chore to find what I needed.’ When’s the last time a student searched a library catalog for kicks?

Powered by the Endeca ProFind™ software, the new library catalog interface provides completely new functionality for keyword searching. Those familiar with keyword searching in the old catalog have probably had the frustrating experience of sorting through many pages of non-relevant results to find a few relevant items. To improve the situation, the NCSU Libraries turned to Endeca, a commercial vendor whose software provides Guided Navigation© for e-commerce sites like Home Depot and Wal-Mart. By allowing users to enter a search query and then browse through the results using a customized set of facets, this tool gives users more power to find the information they need.

As Endeca’s first library customer, the NCSU Libraries is using the rich existing metadata in its bibliographic records to make subject and classification information more accessible to catalog users. After submitting a search, users can quickly browse through the results using facets to find resources that are about a certain topic, genre, region,or time period. Users can also browse results using the Library of Congress Classification hierarchy (call number ranges) as well as by selecting a specific format, library, language, or author. Results are ordered by their relevance to the search query, rather than the date of acquisition as in the old catalog. In addition, the Endeca ProFind™ software provides automatic spell correction and suggests similar search terms that would provide more results.

By combining search and browse techniques in a single interface, this new catalog helps both faculty and students adapt their searches based on their specific research needs and determination of relevancy. By exposing large results sets more transparently, the Libraries hopes to provide better access to the full range of its collections.”

Posted by: AnnaDahlstein | February 21, 2006 05:15 PM

Anna's comment above is the other thing I worry about.

Let me elaborate by explaining why I hate Walt Disney and the company he started. Through the use and misuse of copyright and trademark Disney directly appropriated the whole of European folklore for himself. You can't draw a picture of Pinochio for your neighborhood newsletter or name your cleaning business "Snow White Cleaners" without sweating the day the Disney police show up at your door with a cease and desist order. I know quite a few "educated" but obviously ignorant people who think Uncle Walt "wrote" Snow White.

What's this got to do with Google Book Search, Library or Endeca ProFind? Perhaps I am paranoid. Imagine if these programs beccame so successful and pervasive that they are the only way to find something. It would be a shame if the whole of the world's written words became searchable and retrievable according to the whim and caprice of some profit seeking corporation, only. What happens when the worlds libraries organize themselves to facilitate Google's business, instead of the other way around? Should libraries pay to utilize proprietary techniques for information retrieval? Will there be a Linux equivalent system out there for them if they choose not to walk the line? What happens when one of them doesn't walk the line? Is Google going to use the same strong arm tactics Disney utilizes to smack them down?

Libraries and the knowledge in them are a public good. Through the use of copyright and process patents, Google and Endeca ProFind begin to take them out of the domain of public goods and move them into the sphere of private goods. What if Google owned the process patent on the card catalog(allowable today if someone hadn't already invented it)? Should Google get a royalty or be allowed to place ads in the card catalog? Ridiculous? But that is exactly what will happen when traditional, free, search techniques are supplanted by Google and Endeca ProFind. Google and Endeca ProFind will become the card catalog.

We can't let Google become to all of knowledge what Disney became to European folklore. I hate to say it but I hope and pray that the copyright holders smack down the Googles of the world, at least for this round. That will buy time for a Linux equivalent of what Google is proposing to do.

Posted by: Jardinero1 | February 21, 2006 11:02 PM

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