González Marinas, María Elena

English

Texas ScholarWorks

4 0l l i l a s   p o r t a lIN JANUARY 2007, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS Libraries signed a cooperative agreement with Google to digitize no fewer than one million books from its collections over the next six years. By sum-mer 2008, Google had digitized more than 300,000 volumes from the unique holdings of the Benson Latin American Collection and made available online digital copies of many of the photographs, illustrations,  maps, graphs, and charts as well as the text of two to three hundred of these books. Titles from the Benson that appeared online include such forgotten classics as Paul Groussac’s El viaje intelectual and a rare account by Argentine Navy officer Jose M. Sobral of his exploration of Antarctica, Dos años entre los hielos, 1901–1903.Through the parallel efforts of  Google Library Partners in the United States and Europe, Latin Americanists everywhere in the world will soon have online keyword, author, title, publisher, or publication date access to the full text of tens of thousands of rare and out-of-print books from the finest research collections.   One of four large-scale digitization projects under way in the United States, the Google Library Partners now includes twenty-eight research libraries with total holdings in the hundreds of millions of books. The combined holdings from the libraries of the original five Google partners—Harvard, Michigan, New York Public Library, Oxford, and Stanford—have been estimated at 58 million volumes. Of these, 15 million are planned to be digitized and online within ten years. Other mass-digitization initiatives include the Carnegie Mellon University’s Million Book Project, Microsoft’s Live Search Books, and the well pub-licized Open Content Alliance. Google’s Goals: Online Discovery of Book ContentsGoogle’s main goals are to make the contents of books discoverable by as wide an audience as possible and ultimately help authors and publishers sell more books. Google has the resources, the indexing capacity, the search engine, and so far the incentive to digitize, instan-taneously sort through, and disseminate the millions of bytes that the imaged books are taking up on the Google servers. Since many of the books take up an average of 20 megabytes each, the first lot of 15 mil-lion will absorb a minimum of 300 terabytes of server space. This is about four times the bytes the Library of Congress estimates the U.S. National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program has processed to date. Like all other initiatives to digitize and make gargantuan masses of materials available online, Google is restricted by copyright law. A web of international copyright laws protects recently published books as well as many obscure, hard-to-find, and out-of-print books, preclud-ing their dissemination online. To accommodate legal restrictions, Google developed a three-tiered system for delivering desired texts to users as Snippets, in Limited View, or in Full View. That is, when searched in Google Book Search, texts protected by copyright appear as phrases on a fortune cookie, separated from essential bibliographic information including pagination; these are called Snippets. At most, the Snippet returns a few lines of text before and after the keyword or phrase entered by the user. When permission is granted by the copyright owner—often the publisher of a book—Google more liberally displays as much as 50–75 percent of the book. If a book is clearly in the public domain, then the book appears in full text ready for downloading by the user IBENSON SNIPPETS:DIGITIZED COPIES OF BOOKS FROM LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTION APPEAR ONLINE by  María  Elena  González  Mar inas 4 1l l i l a s   p o r t a las a document file. In some cases, there is no preview of the book at all but basic bib-liographic information is provided including author, title, publisher, date of publication, number of pages. When the holder of a text is one of the library partners, the name of the library is identified. Additional links in the “About This Book” section of the Google Book Search results guide the reader to the libraries nearest them that also have the book in their collections. Google directs readers interested in purchasing books to links to publishers, online vendors, and used book dealers. Google earns revenues from publishers willing to pay for each reader clicking on the publishers’ Web sites and by selling links to nonpublisher sites related to the book’s con-tents; so far, these last are few and appear unobtrusively as footers in the Google Book Search results page. Although revenue fig-ures related to publisher site visits have been impossible to tally from public records, Google claims to have agreements with more than 10,000 publishers. As long as these agreements are profitable, Google Book Search revenues remain relatively secure and unprofitable clicks to library Web sites will likely continue to be subsidized.Inevitable ControversyControversy about the Google initiative broke out shortly after the first Library Partner pilot projects were announced in 2004. Complaints revolved around two key points: Google intended not only to scan and add to their databases the entire contents of all partner library books—whether or not protected by copyright—but also to index the material. Com-mercial publishers and university presses sued on grounds that the scanning of copyrighted texts as well as the proprietary indexing by Google went beyond fair use and thus violated the rights of copyright holders. In turn, Google proposed an opt-out program for publishers and authors who did not want their works digi-tized or publicized by Google. It should be very clear, however, that Google never intended to make public the full text or even parts of text of materials protected by copyright. Although the case has not been resolved, substantive arguments as to whether the use of text snip-pets or image thumbnails falls under the fair use provisions outlined by U.S. copyright law have taken on new dimensions as lawsuits unrelated to research and teaching purposes make their way through the courts. Fearing Google as a colossal advertising mechanism as well as a popular search engine, many suspect that it will likely be the enter-prise to implement a yet-to-be devised business model to exploit the scholarly texts commer-cially. If that turns out to be the case, no one can determine the long-term consequences of trusting Google to control such a vast collec-tion of research material. Competitors are also concerned about Google’s incomparable capital resources and power to squelch innovation in the mining of large digital collections. For a specialized bibliography that traces specula-tion about the impactof the Google initiative on publishing and research patterns, one may refer to Google Book Search by former Univer-sity of Houston librarian Charles W. Bailey, Jr. See http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm Like all other initiatives to digitize and make gargantuan masses of materials available online, Google is restricted by copyright law. To accommodate legal restrictions, Google develop-ed a three-tiered system for delivering desired texts to users as Snippets, in Limited View, or in Full View.On the other hand, anxiety about the like-lihood that Google will abandon the Google Library Partnerships before reaching its stated goals peaked in May 2008 when Microsoft announced that it would end similar mass-digitization projects, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Services. By that date, Microsoft and its partners had digitized three-quarter million books and tens of millions of scholarly journal articles. Microsoft turned over the digital files to Ingram Digital, which already had functioned as the host for the Microsoft Live Search Books files. Presumably, publishers will now have to renegotiate terms with Ingram or opt out of the project. Less concerned about business practices, some scholars fear that popular mass digiti-zation programs will reduce the motivation of research libraries to preserve the origi-nal copies. Others question the rationale for 4 2l l i l a s   p o r t a lindividual works, with the intent of uncovering the maximum number of titles in the public domain. Books in the public domain may be presented online in full view and prepared for downloading by anyone with adequate technology. Copyright Laws in Latin America The global distribution of potential readers and authors complicates the determination of the copyright status of individual works disseminated online. Although the language of current copyright laws flows from that of the Berne Convention and is harmonized through multilateral treaties among coun-tries, definitions and duration of copyright protection vary widely from country to country. The laws of individual countries distinguish authored works, anonymous and pseudony-mous works, edited works, and translations as well as works-for-hire, among others, while copyright protection terms vary from fifty to one hundred years, sometimes calculated from the date of publication for compiled works or from the year of death for authored works. In the case of multiple authors, copyright protec-tion is calculated from the year of death of the last living author. The classification of creative works, the identification of authors, the accurate deter-mination of author death, and the correct calculation of the duration of copyright are complex, time-consuming, and painstaking tasks. They are also risky, as errors could prove embarrassing, if not expensive. Consequently, the rules for determining the copyright status of large numbers of books must be extremely conservative. That is the case with Google’s algorithms. According to the U.S. law, books published anywhere before 1923 are no longer protected in the United States and are categorically in the public domain. After that date, a series of conditions related to copyright formalities, trade agreements, treaties, and court decisions must be conjugated in order to arrive at the copyright status of a work. Ironically, at dif-ferent times U.S. law has provided copyright protection beyond the term the works enjoyed in the country of origin. Many of the books in the Benson Latin American Collection are works that had been in the public domain in the country of origin but were republished with a new foreword, annotations, or similar editorial additions, thus making it difficult to imaging millions of printed pages at a time that scholars demand massive data sets they can manipulate. To date, mapping, notation, and data aggregation tools provided by Google have proven inadequate for scholarly use. Library Partner GoalsMany research libraries, including the Library of Congress, have undertaken ambitious book digitization programs but not on this scale. Given the limited resources and lack of access to the necessary technology, individual research libraries have not been able to digitize more than a few thousand of their books, confirming librarians’ estimates that digitization of their holdings would take generations to complete. Google’s proposal to digitize and service the digital archive of their collections at no cost to the research libraries not only accelerated the rate at which the digitization processes can take place, but it promises to quickly multiply the number of printed books to be digitized from the thousands to the millions. Alliance with Google assures research libraries that their books will be more easily discovered by users worldwide and their col-lections made known beyond the walls of an institution. These outcomes advance the mission of universities to disseminate knowledge and fulfill the mandate of libraries to expand and diversify access services. Librarians are begin-ning to accept digital copies as an important means of preserving their collections much as they once did microfilm reproductions of books and manuscripts so that partnering with Google has been repeatedly justified as an affordable long-term preservation strategy. The creation of digital copies for preservation is defensible as a fair use and is sensible as a solution to replacement for lost and fragile items. Several research libraries, such as those at the University of Michigan and Stanford University, also have leveraged these large-scale projects to develop user-oriented search applications and improve the integration of disparate digital collections. In connection with the Google Library Partnership, the University of Texas Libraries staff is testing the means to link the corresponding digitized texts to the main online catalog author entries.   In addition, research staff began an inves-tigation of copyright laws in various Latin American countries and joined colleagues at the University of Michigan in refining proce-dures for determining the copyright status of separate the original text for dissemination throughout the digital public domain. Edited and republished works make up a substantial portion of research libraries like the Benson Latin American Collection, which increased book purchases and exchanges during the 1960s. All of the republished work will be protected by copyright law for many more years and will continue to appear to the Google Book Searcher as Snippets. Creative Uses of Google Book Search Although small-scale and mass digitization projects have been recognized as a boon to classicists, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern scholars in general, Latin Americanists have not had enough time to use the newly available materials and to publicize their expe-riences accessing and utilizing mass digital libraries. Recent postings on discussion lists and formal publications by historians, print history, and book culture scholars in general have been mostly negative, creating additional doubt about the value of the endeavor. The more positive comments admit to the useful-ness of mechanisms that allow user-chosen searches over millions of books and recognize Google Book Search as an effective finding aid for pinpointing the location of arcane and regional materials currently scattered worldwide without having to consult foreign language union catalogs. Because the books that are being digitized come off the shelves as raw inventory from dozens of research libraries, few attempts have been made to select or curate subcollections in relation to the interest or research needs of faculty and students. Indeed, the individual researcher must carefully select from a huge mass of digitized titles for their personal-ized collections. It will be up to researchers to prompt their home institutions to assist in those searches and to provide the tools to restructure the contents within the digitized books so that they can be analyzed and manip-ulated as a mass—of snippets.Explore Google Books Search, http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search and have a say on what will be done next!María Elena González Marinas is Assistant Professor in the Library and Information Science Program at Wayne State University. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. ✹

Benson Snippets: Digitized Copies of Books from Latin American Collection Appear Online

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/2152/61869/3/16Portal_issue3_2008_GonzalezMarinas.pdf

Benson Snippets: Digitized Copies of Books from Latin American Collection Appear Online

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