Resource review #5: Libraries and Google: a love/hate relationship

Waller, V. (22 August 2009) "The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information" First Monday, 14 (9). Retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279 

   I'll just get this out of the way. One thing that's really gotten to me in the course of reading all these articles is that librarians and other authors can't seem to keep the name of Google's digitization project straight. I understand that it's changed several times, from Google Print, to Google Library Project, to Google Book Search, to Google Books. According to the Google's history of the project, the name was changed to Google Books in 2005. That's plenty of time for librarians to catch up. If you're going to write an article that's critical of something, you've got to have your facts straight. Getting the object of criticism's name right should be the absolute bare minimum. Similarly, Waller doesn't seem to know the names of Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When citing their published work, she lists their last names correctly, but when she mentions them in passing, she refers to them as Sergey and Brin every time. I'm sure I'm guilty of my own fair share of typos, so I try not to harp on this sort of thing. But in all other respects, this article is very academic (if I was on the reference desk, I'd tell students it was scholarly), so in that context, this kind of error is rather glaring.

   Waller's article describes the partnership between Google and libraries in terms of the stages of a romantic relationship. At first, libraries felt that their goals matched perfectly with Google's, whose "stated mission is to organise the world’s information and make it useful." However, with time, libraries have realized that the match isn't so perfect after all. Most of the problems Waller lists stem from the fact that Google is a private company--it is driven by advertising revenue; it doesn't share the concern of libraries for users' privacy; and as a private company, it could go out of business, taking with it the massive number of books it has digitized. Additionally, Waller notes the suggestion made by many librarians that Google has "[conflated] information retrieval and knowledge." Waller (and the librarians she cites) fear that "the Google effect" will lead to a mindset that ignores traditional research methods in favor of shortcuts. Similarly, she cites "concerns that the relationship between the reader and a digital text will be superficial in comparison with the intimate relationship that can develop between a reader or scholar and a physical text," and fears "the possibility that searching a book will become an increasingly adequate substitute for reading it." Finally, she notes the complicated nature of digital preservation issues. 

   To her credit, Waller is not suggesting that librarians cut ties with Google. Rather, she stresses the importance of using Google as a starting point, and emphasizing to library users the limits of Google as a research tool. She argues that librarians "should teach library users, through example, about the difference between freely flowing information and balanced information. They should not be afraid of giving priority to more significant information. They should also be discussing the losses involved in representing an aspect of an analogue world with ones and zeroes. As philosopher of technology Don Ihde says, it is ‘what is revealed is what excites; what is concealed may be forgotten.’ Libraries need to pay attention to that which is concealed by Google’s search results and by digitised information. What is concealed includes vital aspects of human knowledge and culture and it is part of the task of the public library to preserve these things." 

   One of Waller's main points is that for information to be accessible and useful, it has to be organized, with priority given to information of greater significance. She claims that Google's search results have no such organization, but are only organized and ranked in order to serve the needs of advertisers. In fact, the organization of Google's search results has been well-documented--results are ranked by an algorithm influenced by citation analysis. It's certainly not perfect, but it is a form of relevance ranking and organization. Waller's failure to acknowledge this seems like a pretty big oversight.

   I'm also somewhat bothered by Waller's suggestion that if Google goes out of business, its digital library will disappear. Every participating library gets a digital copy of the books it allows Google to digitize. These can (and are) used in various ways--copies can be printed on the Espresso Book Machine, digital material can be integrated into the library's OPAC, libraries can create their own digital libraries, like the Hathi Trust Digital Repository, which began at the University of Michigan and is now a partnership between thirteen large research universities. Just because content is originally digitized by Google doesn't mean it has to live there exclusively. However, the problems Waller notes are real. Librarians should feel uncomfortable partnering with an organization that collects data about individual users and shares that data with advertisers. The Google settlement stipulates that public libraries can each have one terminal from which the public can access all of the material available on Google Books--will the convenience and benefits of this access be outweighed by the presence of targeted advertising and the potential invasion of users' privacy? I don't know. I'm planning on tackling privacy issues (and the dreaded copyright/legal challenges) next.