What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books? - August 10, 2017

What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?

By Jennifer Howard     Aug 10, 2017

edSurge: Postsecondary learning

"It was a crazy idea: Take the bulk of the world’s books, scan them, and create a monumental digital library for all to access. That’s what Google dreamed of doing when it embarked on its ambitious book-digitizing project in 2002. It got part of the way there, digitizing at least 25 million books from major university libraries.

But the promised library of everything hasn’t come into being. An epic legal battle between authors and publishers and the Internet giant over alleged copyright violations dragged on for years. A settlement that would have created a Book Rights Registry and made it possible to access the Google Books corpus through public-library terminals ultimately died, rejected by a federal judge in 2011. And though the same judge ultimately dismissed the case in 2013, handing Google a victory that allowed it to keep on scanning, the dream of easy and full access to all those works remains just that."

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KU/OAPEN Press Release: Google Scholar Indexes Open Access Books

 Google Scholar Indexes Open Access Books 

The length of monographs and their level of treatment pose unique challenges in a search environment. Monographs generally describe mature work unlike journal articles, which usually describe early stage work. As a result, it can be hard to achieve a successful search experience for restricted access monographs, according to Anurag Acharya of Google Scholar.

After asking Acharya (co-founder of Google Scholar) why Google Scholar did not index monographs, Frances Pinter of Knowledge Unlatched (KU) says, “I realized that such challenges fall by the wayside with Open Access books.”  

Pinter explained that the dataset of 28 books from the KU Pilot was likely to be too small for Google to try out on open books. “So I told Anurag Acharya about OAPEN’s platform and its nearly 2,500 Open Access books,” says Pinter.

OAPEN and Knowledge Unlatched are pleased to announce that Google Scholar is now able to index Open Access books hosted by OAPEN.

Please find October 28, 2015 full press release here: http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/press-release/

Best regards,

Christina

—

Christina Emery

Partnership Manager | Knowledge Unlatched

christina@knowledgeunlatched.org

www.knowledgeunlatched.org

Winner: IFLA/Brill Award for Open Access 2014

Winner: Curtin University Award for Best Innovation in Education 2015

Citation tracking service by Google and Microsoft Academic

Computing giants launch free science metrics

New Google and Microsoft services promise to democratize citation data.

Declan Butler 

Nature |  Published online 2 August 2011 | Nature 476, 18 (2011) | doi:10.1038/476018a

 "Mapping the landscape of science is about to get easier than ever before. Google and Microsoft are rolling out free tools that will enable researchers to analyse citation statistics, visualize research networks and track the hottest research fields.

The systems could be attractive for scientists and institutions that are unable — or unwilling — to pay for existing metrics platforms, such as Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge and Elsevier's Scopus database."

OpenID

OpenID  http://openid.net/get-an-openid/what-is-openid/

Gain Greater Control Over Your Online Identity

"OpenID is a decentralized standard, meaning it is not controlled by any one website or service provider. You control how much personal information you choose to share with websites that accept OpenIDs, and multiple OpenIDs can be used for different websites or purposes. If your email (Google, Yahoo, AOL), photo stream (Flickr) or blog (Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal) serves as your primary online presence, OpenID allows you to use that portable identity across the web."

Google Art Project - digital images and art

Google Art Project: http://www.googleartproject.com/

Google is tackling the brave new world of digital images and art.

What is the ‘Art Project’?

A unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.

• Explore museums with Street View technology: virtually move around the museum’s galleries, selecting works of art that interest you, navigate though interactive floor plans and learn more about the museum and you explore.
• Artwork View: discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings. Expanding the info panel allows you to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos.
• Create your own collection: the ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family.

Why is there a difference between the museums in terms of the number of galleries, artworks and related information?

Google approached the museum partners without any curatorial direction, and each museum was able to chose the number of galleries, artwork and information they wanted to include, based on reasons specific to them. All content in the information panel pertaining to individual artworks was also provided by the museums.

Why are some areas or specific paintings in the museum Street View imagery blurred?

Some of the paintings and features captured with Street View were required to be blurred by the museums for reasons pertaining to copyrights.

Are the images on the Art Project site copyright protected?

Yes. The high resolution imagery of artworks featured on the art project site are owned by the museums, and these images are protected by copyright laws around the world. The Street View imagery is owned by Google. All of the imagery on this site is provided for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the art project site, in the manner permitted by Google’s Terms of Service.

Google's Ngram Viewer

I've been seeing many blurbs the past couple weeks about Google Books Ngram Viewer (way to mine text for word usage). I thought this blog entry provided some good links to the pros and cons of Ngram.

http://www.dancohen.org/2010/12/19/initial-thoughts-on-the-google-books-ngram-viewer-and-datasets/

From Google Labs (details):

See how often phrases have occurred in the world's books over the years. Google Books has scanned over 10% of all books ever published, and now you can graph the occurrence of phrases up to five words in length from 1400 through the present day right in your browser. We currently support the following languages:

• Chinese
• English
• French
• German
• Hebrew
• Russian

If Web Browsers Were Celebrities [Infographic]

This great inforgraphic was created by Shane Snow, a New York based artist and founder of Printing Choice
“If Web Browsers Were Celebrities” is brought to you by Wix.com. Use creative design to make a Flash website.

You are most welcome to share this infographic with your audience.

Google Strikes Deal with French Publisher Hachette Livre to scan French titles

A New York Times story reports: “Google said Wednesday [November 17, 2010] that it had reached a deal with the publisher Hachette Livre, which has broken ranks with its French rivals and agreed to allow Google to scan thousands of out-of-print books for its digital library project.

Under the agreement, which follows a landmark settlement with U.S. publishers last year, Google will be allowed to sell the books it scans as e-books or in other electronic formats.

But there is one important difference between the U.S. settlement and the deal with Hachette, the largest publisher in France and the No.2 trade publisher by sales worldwide, after Pearson. Hachette, not Google, will determine which of the books covered by the deal — those that remain under copyright but are no longer commercially available — can be scanned.”

Google Book Settlement website

The website is maintained by Rust Consulting, Inc., the Settlement Administrator, with technical support and hosting provided by Google Inc., the defendant in the lawsuit.

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/

Wolfram Alpha "a new kind of research helper"

Wolfram Alpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html

New York Times article
April 28, 2009, 6:28 pm — Updated: 12:54 am

The Veil Is Lifted From Wolfram Alpha

By Miguel Helft
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/wolfram-alpha-veil-lifted/?em

"Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine.

In a talk at Harvard Law School, Stephen Wolfram, a well-known mathematician, scientist and entrepreneur, gave a demonstration of his soon-to-be released Web service which promises to answer all sorts of questions. The service, called Wolfram Alpha, had technology bloggers abuzz that a rival to Google was about to hit the Web."

YouTube the demo that Stephen Wolfram gave at Harvard in late April 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIOH80Qg7Q

Google Search advances

May 12, 2009, 4:54 pm (New York Times)
Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: May 9, 2009
(former top visual designer at Google deplores design changes because of user feedback)

"CAN a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want? These questions surfaced recently when Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google."

May 12, 2009, 4:54 pm (New York Times)
Google Revs Up Some New Search Features

By Miguel Helft

"Google unveiled a grab bag of enhancements to its Web search engine and new experimental features on Tuesday that aim to keep the company ahead of rivals. The new features include Google’s first significant effort not only to find information on the Web but also to understand some of that information and present it in new ways. Google’s engineers showcased an experimental feature called Google Squared that extracts information from the Web and displays it in a table..." more

US Election Map Using Google Maps

Keep up-to-date on the 2008 election with Google Maps

"On election day, it will take at least 270 of the possible 538 electoral votes for John McCain or Barack Obama to win the Presidency. Use this map to predict possible state combinations each candidate needs to win the election. Clicking on a state will change the total electoral vote count per candidate."

Source: Elections '08 Map Gallery

Google lawsuit and UC project

It is good news that a proposed agreement has been submitted to the United States District Court to settle a lawsuit against the Google Book Search digitization project.

While the three major library partners (the University of California, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University) were not parties in the lawsuit, Google requested extensive input from us on issues of importance to library and university communities. For nearly two years, we strongly advocated for library interests including maximum public access to works in the public domain. Our efforts to preserve, maintain, and provide access to books played a critical role in achieving this agreement. While the settlement is not all we would have liked it to be, on balance the agreement is consistent with the libraries' mission and serves the public interest by providing the widest possible access to these materials.

The settlement agreement allows us to continue our participation in the Google Book Search project. The partner libraries and Google will review and update our original contracts to reflect the terms of the settlement.

I have attached a joint press release from the major library partners, and you can find more information from Google at http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/.

Gerry Munoff
University Librarian, University of California Irvine
----------------
From Metafilter:
"The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search."
---------------
Authors, publishers settle suit against Google
By HILLEL ITALIE - AP (Associated Press) October 28, 2008

UC Irvine 10 Things winner!

After ten months since the program was announced I was awarded the "First Finisher" of the UC Irvine 10 Things Library event. Wow! I finished the ten Web 2.0 tasks before Thanksgiving 2007 so we can get to the main issue - using these tools in a practical sense. Let us move forward, please ...

This article, "New Open-Access Humanities Press Makes Its Debut" is available online at this address:

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=jghhr4Qw8wcwVqhpx3Jwq9pMt4mMFJmd

This article will be available to non-subscribers of The Chronicle for up to five days after it is e-mailed.

New Open-Access Humanities Press Makes Its Debut

By JENNIFER HOWARD

Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.

The nonprofit operation—described by those involved...

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2759n.htm

About Open Humanities Press
Gary Hall and Sigi Jottkandt met with faculty and librarians at UC Irvine on April 3, 2008 in a stimulating discussion. I know that I got a lot of useful information, and I sensed that it may have been the same for each of you. Here is a group of urls compiled by Maureen Burns (thank you, Maureen!), to which I've added a few, that came out of the meeting. I've also indicated where participants in today's meeting have affiliations with these journals/repositories, etc. If any of you would like to add others, or if you have some fine-tuning to the following, please respond to this e-list.

I also have gotten feedback from some of you expressing further interest in the e-Scholarship repository, for which I imagine a few of us could put together a workshop. Let me know if you have other ideas that came out of this meeting.

Open Humanities Press http://openhumanitiespress.org/ (Co-Founders: Gary Hall and Sigi Jottkandt)
Postmodern Culture http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html (Editor: Eyal Amiran)
Project MUSE http://muse.jhu.edu/about/index.html
Council of Editors of Learned Journals http://www.celj.org/history.php
Karagarga Info (e-mail Mark Poster poster@uci.edu for an invite) http://criticalculture.blogspot.com/2007/03/karagarga.html
UC CDL eScholarship Repository http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/
Journal for Learning through the Arts http://repositories.cdlib.org/clta/lta/ (Systems Administrator: Maureen Burns; Copy Editor, Barbara Cohen)
ibiblio http://www.ibiblio.org/
Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.sfu.ca/
Open Journal Systems http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
Sample of Journals http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals
First Monday http://www.firstmonday.dk/
Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net (Co Executive Editor: Gary Hall)
Cultural Studies e-archive (CSeARCH) http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch (Gary Hall)
Thomson Scientific http://scientific.thomson.com/

Make Textbooks Affordable campaign
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/textbooks.asp?id2=14215
Open Students
http://www.openstudents.org/

An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant

An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant
By ANDREA L. FOSTER

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 54, Issue 24, Page A11
From the issue dated February 22, 2008

"At only 21, Aaron Swartz is attempting to turn the library world upside down. He is taking on the subscription-based WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database on the planet, by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update.

Many academic librarians are wary of Mr. Swartz's project because it will allow nonlibrarians, who may be prone to errors, to catalog books"

New Google Apps - Knol and Image Labeler

Google has announced an alternative to Wikipedia, called Google Knol. Authors (with their real names) will be featured prominently on the articles they wrote, and can optionally receive ad revenue. Articles (or "knols" as Google calls them) with high ranks will appear in regular Google web search results. For now, the site is in testing and contributors are by invite-only. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Also, I've discovered Google has an interesting image labeling game. This has been out for awhile, but I thought it was experimental, developed by some researchers at Carnegie Mellon. Perhaps Google hired them. Basically, you and another random person type in keywords for images that are displayed on your screen. For every word that you and your random partner match, you get points. It's perhaps a new way for the masses to add metadata to content.
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

Steve DiDomenico
Northwestern University Library -- Digital Library Systems Development
steve at northwestern.edu 847-491-4230 Evanston, IL