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December 14, 2004

Project Ocean

I can't wait to find out this morning if John Batelle's got the real scoop on Google's latest collaboration with Academic Libraries/Repositories. (found via Boing Boing)

This announcement, following so closely on the heels of Google Scholar (via metafilter), might frighten some librarians, who imagine themselves being chased into obsolescence by computer scientists throwing processing power at the web's information organization challenge.

In fact, these efforts should serve notice that Google "gets" information access and retrieval, and that they view themselves as the library's ally, not competitor. All of their services value and build upon our information organization work. I'm going to have to visit my colleagues up the road and find out who's running this project.

Posted by Keeper of the Blog at December 14, 2004 12:00 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Just got to add this I found rereading the metafilter discussion of Google Scholar. Jessamyn's got it right (she's a librarian and blogarian).

"Here's another librarian take on it. I think it's interesting as a front end fast search with a simple familiar interface, but truth be told it's not really giving full text access to much more stuff [and I don't know about you, but my search was cluttered with books which weren't available at all and cites to a bunch of things that I then had to go to a library and get anyhow, or to a full-text database]. Just like OCLC Worldcat shows you a much smaller subset and says it's showing you "libraries" this is showing you a small subset and calling it "scholarship." Once Google is willing to pony up and explain how they decide what's scholarly. Don't get me wrong, I like it lots, but it's as interesting for what it doesn't do as for what it does. Federated searching with simple interfaces are where things are going and if Google can be the kick in the ass to get libraries going on it [or solve the problem for them in a total, not partial, way] I'm all for it."

Librarians need to wake up and smell the fire Google's lit under 'em and start focus their information organization efforts towards more user friendly interfaces.

Posted by: metametadata at December 14, 2004 12:20 AM

I in fact know who is likely to be running this project. Bill Comstock in Digital Imaging. I just met him last month to see his implementation of DocWorks MetaE software for automatic generation and editing of METS structural metadata for compound digital objects (like books).

Posted by: metametadata at December 14, 2004 09:39 AM

When I was a kid, I worked at the library. One time, I had a book I'd checked out on spaceship art at home that I'd forgot about under my bed. When I found it, I was so scared--I knew I was going to have a ginormous late fee. But then I remembered I could go into the SE MN library cooperative database and erase my fee in two seconds. Librarians are powerful.

Posted by: J Commander at December 14, 2004 09:50 AM

Ooh, thanks for the heads-up. I'd been wondering about those "Project Ocean" rumors (heard something about it at ALA Annual, mostly regarding some sort of pre-1923 scanning of Stanford's collections by Google) so it's nice to get some actual details...

Posted by: carol o at December 14, 2004 12:05 PM