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Thursday, August 31, 2006
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U. of Michigan Adds Books Digitized by Google to Online Catalog, but Limits Use of Some
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Information Technology
U. of Michigan adds
books digitized by Google to online catalog, but limits use of some
As it works with Google to scan nearly all the books on its shelves, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has decided not to make full-text versions of copyrighted books available online, even to on-campus users.
The university has upgraded its online card catalog to include full-text electronic copies of books that have been scanned as part of its controversial partnership with Google.
Users will be able to read the complete text of out-of-copyright works online. For those volumes, the university is making high-resolution images available for each page. That could be particularly valuable for researchers studying any material in the margins of the scanned books.
If a scanned book is still under copyright, though, users will not be able to read the digital copy. Instead, the card-catalog system will return a list of the pages that contain the search term and how many times the term appears on those pages. The reader will be directed to the library's stacks for the printed book.
Some observers had wondered whether the university might make full-text versions of copyrighted books available at on-campus computers, but Michigan officials ruled out that option early on. "We don't believe that fair use allows us to make that kind of access available to our user community," said John P. Wilkin, an associate university librarian.
The fair-use doctrine allows educators to reproduce a limited portion of copyrighted material for classroom use without seeking permission or paying royalties. But how far that principle applies to putting copyrighted materials online is an area of dispute.
Publishers have objected to Google's project, in which it is working with several major university libraries to scan books to add to its index. Although Google is making only short excerpts of copyrighted books available to users, publishers argue that no one can make digital copies of books -- even just for indexing -- without express permission from the copyright holders.
Michigan's contract with Google stipulates that a digital copy of each book scanned by the search-engine company will be given to the university for its own use. The university calls its digitized copies "MBooks."
Copy and Paste
A key difference between Michigan's digital books and Google's versions of the same texts is that Michigan makes it possible to copy and paste material from the pages. The pages offered on Google Book Search are image files that do not allow easy copying and pasting.
Last week Google added a new feature to its service, allowing users to download copies of some public-domain books to their personal computers. But those downloadable books, too, do not allow easy cutting and pasting.
The ability to easily lift blocks of texts for quotation would be a boon to scholars who are writing papers, but it could also make plagiarism easier. Mr. Wilkin said Michigan officials were not worried that their new service might somehow aggravate that problem. "Most of the resources we provide to students also make this sort of thing possible," he said.
The university's MBooks service was designed with academics in mind, he said. For one thing, the campus library is careful to make sure that all links to the digital texts remain constant, so that scholars can cite the digital books in their papers without worrying that the links will become obsolete.
Steven J. Bell, director of the library at Philadelphia University, said Michigan's new digital-book service could spur more scholars around the world to use interlibrary loans to request single pages or groups of pages from books held by Michigan. After all, if scholars can consult Michigan's online catalog to find out which pages contain the terms they are looking for, they might request just those pages rather than the entire book.
"It might really have some implications for the whole resource-sharing" aspect of library services, said Mr. Bell. "It really does simplify my ability to tap into that content from afar."
Background articles from The Chronicle:
- U. of California Will Provide Up to 3,000 Books a Day to Google for Scanning, Contract States (8/25/2006)
- Google Wages Fresh Campaign Against Critics of Project to Digitize Library Books (2/23/2006)
- U. of Michigan President Defends Library's Role in Controversial Google Scanning Project (2/7/2006)
- 5 Big Publishing Houses Sue Google to Prevent Scanning of Copyrighted Works (10/20/2005)
- U. of Michigan Unveils Its Book-Scanning Contract With Google (6/20/2005)
- Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Leading Research Libraries (12/14/2004)