[LIS-Forum] FW: [DIGLIB] article: "A Risky Gamble With Google"

-- Dr. RSR Varalakshmi Professor, Dept. of Library and Information Science., Andhra University. Visakhapatnam.

From: Glen Newton - NRC/CNRC CISTI/ICIST Research Reply-To: glen.newton@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca To: diglib@infoserv.inist.fr Subject: [DIGLIB] article: "A Risky Gamble With Google" Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 20:56:48 -0500

"A Risky Gamble With Google" Chronicle of Higher Education (12/02/05) Vol. 52, No. 15, P. B7 Vaidhyanathan, Siva

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"Though Google's effort to digitize and offer free online access to millions of books from major English-language libraries is an exciting prospect, New York University professor Siva Vaidhyanathan contends that the initiative could compromise much of the freedom and integrity that libraries and other reference resources embody for scholars, researchers, and the general public. Google's reputation as an egalitarian information resource can only be sustained through expansion, and its mission statement to index the world's data raises issues of propriety while also implying that libraries, universities, and other traditional disseminators of information can no longer perform such duties adequately, according to Vaidhyanathan. The author warns that the Google Library Project increases the risk of privacy infringement, as Google's privacy policy makes no promise that the company will keep patrons' individual reading records from the FBI or local law enforcement. Privatization of information resource maintenance is another area of concern because of the inherent instability of businesses, and Google is essentially a business. Vaidhyanathan argues that stable public institutions should oversee a project such as Google Library. The project's most dire implication is the burden it adds to an already unbalanced copyright system, which creates even more uncertainty for librarians, students, researchers, and other innocent copyright users. "The presumption that Google's powers of indexing and access come close to working as a library ignores all that libraries mean to the lives of their users," Vaidhyanathan concludes. "All the proprietary algorithms in the world are not going to replace them." " From: http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2005-7/1202f.html#item18

-- Glen Newton | glen.newton@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca Group Leader (Acting), CISTI Research Chef de groupe (par intérim), Recherche de l'ICIST tel/tél: 613-990-9163 | facsimile/télécopieur 613-952-8246 Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) National Research Council Canada (NRC)| M-55, 1200 Montreal Road http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/ Institut canadien de l'information scientifique et technique (ICIST) Conseil national de recherches Canada | M-55, 1200 chemin Montréal Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R6 Government of Canada | Gouvernement du Canada --