In this article, Ronald G. Musto, a medieval historian, describes the “promise and perils” of using Google Books for historical research. Musto’s work involves studying archival records related to Naples in the Middle Ages. He briefly describes the repeated destruction and subsequent reconstruction of those records. He notes that “for the few of us who work on the city's urban development, that double mutilation -- of both its archival and architectural past -- makes work difficult at best. More than many other historians, we have to rely on remnants to recreate this history.” Many of these remnants are now available on Google Books, which Musto is decidedly not satisfied with.
Like almost everyone involved in the debate about Google Books, Musto is pleased with the level of new access the resource provides. However, citing a key work in his field, he rails against the quality of Google’s scanning:
“In its frenzy to digitize the holdings of its partner collections, in this case those of the Stanford University Libraries, Google Books has pursued a "good enough" scanning strategy. The books' pages were hurriedly reproduced: No apparent quality control was employed, either during or after scanning. The result is that 29 percent of the pages in Volume 1 and 38 percent of the pages in Volume 2 are either skewed, blurred, swooshed, folded back, misplaced, or just plain missing. A few images even contain the fingers of the human page-turner. (Like a medieval scribe, he left his own pointing hand on the page!) Not bad, one might argue, for no charge and on your desktop. But now I'm dealing with a mutilated edition of a mutilated selection of a mutilated archive of a mutilated history of a mutilated kingdom -- hardly the stuff of the positivist, empirical method I was trained in a generation ago.”
While he admits that this is just one book, and that a cursory search of materials outside his field of study fails to reveal a similar concentration of errors, the poor scanning quality seems to essentially push him over the rhetorical edge. He expresses concerns that Google’s poorly scanned books will replace the world’s collections of rare books and archival materials, arguing that “should Google Books prevail, and the resources of the scholarly community be made irrelevant by Google's sheer scale and force, the future of our past will be in great doubt.”
This view seems pretty extreme to me, but it’s expressed often enough in a variety of articles and blog posts to merit discussion. I don’t think that Google Books is about preservation. I think it’s about access. The ability to do full-text searching in four million books is ridiculously convenient, and that massive opportunity comes at the expense of precision and quality. But given the legal complications of the Google Books settlement, I don’t think that access at the expense of preservation is an argument that Google’s leaders want to be publicly pushing. In a recent New York Times editorial called “A Library to Last Forever,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin (on the basis of title alone) is obviously suggesting that the project is justified because it will digitally preserve the world’s libraries.* So I suppose it makes sense to judge Google Books by the stringent standards that the goal of preservation implies, since these are the claims that the company itself is making.
Still, I don’t see any reason to jump to the conclusion that Google’s digitial copies of books are going to make physical collections irrelevant, especially in the case of rare books. If Google were to launch a project involving digitization of the world’s art, I don’t think anyone would suggest that museum curators may as well trash the original “Starry Night.” However, I do understand that the tenor of Musto’s argument is provoked in part by the arrogance of Google’s stated goals. He suggests that Google believes that the noble goals and public good resulting from the project grant them the “right to turn copyright on its head.” It’s an important point, as the stakes are pretty high. Whatever comes out of the settlement, the repercussions will be huge. Once I read a bit more about the new proposed settlement, I’ll blog about it.
*Brin does point out that without access, preservation doesn’t really matter: “…if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily.”
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