The Google Books Project has drawn a great deal of attention, offering the prospect of the library of the future and rendering many other library and digitizing projects apparently superfluous. To grasp the value of Google’s endeavor, we need among other things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging.
In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps.
First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance.” In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google’s Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved.
Then I chose one book to sample the Google’s Project, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Project Gutenberg, but more surprisingly, it evidently challenged Google’s approach, suggesting that quality is not automatically inherited.
In conclusion, I suggest that a strain of romanticism may limit Google’s ability to deal with that very awkward object, the book.
The Social Life of Legal Information
We need less cheerleading and more constructive critique.
Academic freedom and the hacker ethic
Hackers advocate the free pursuit and sharing of knowledge without restriction, even as they acknowledge that applying it is something else.
Relearning Learning: Applying the Long Tail to Learning
In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe “pouring knowledge into somebody’s head." We learn through our interactions with others and the world ...
The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization
As opportunities for innovation and growth migrate to the peripheries of companies, industries, and the global economy, efficiency will no longer be enough to sustain competitive advantage. The only sustainable advantage in the future will come from an institutional capacity to work closely with other highly specialized firms to get better faster.
Old Search Engine, the Library, Tries to Fit Into a Google World
"The nature of discovery is changing." "It has huge ramifications."
"We can show people things they don't ask for."
