Librarian Central

Libraries and Google/Google Book Search: No Competition!

By Walt Crawford, Senior Analyst at RLG

Locality. Expertise. Community. Resources.

Four characteristics of every good public and academic library—and four reasons librarians shouldn't worry about competition from search engines, Google Book Search, or the Open Content Alliance (OCA). Rather, you should think of them as complementary tools and learn to make best use of them.

Let's look at four reasons libraries don't need to fear Google Book Search or Google itself—and some things librarians can do to make search engines and libraries more complementary.

Locality
Every good library is a local library, guided by the needs and preferences of its neighborhood, city, college, or university. That's true of your collection, and even in large academic libraries, studies show less overlap than you'd expect. It should also be true of your services, and future libraries seem likely to be even more attuned to local needs and feedback.

Google Book Search and OCA are global resources. Google and other web search engines search the online universe. Sure, there are “local” settings, but those relate searches to geography. They don't reflect the nature of the locality the way that good libraries do.

Many libraries focus on local resources, and particularly local history. If that's true of your library, you should be sure that Google and friends make it easy for people to find your special resources. Your local history center should have its own pages on your website, and those pages should be optimized so searches will get there when they should. That's true of all your library's special services and resources.

Did I just say “optimized?” Yes. While some “search engine optimization” is an attempt to game search engines, other search engine optimization is entirely legitimate: making sure your web pages describe themselves in a way that yields appropriate results.

When I search “history ‘mountain view'” or “history ‘redwood city,'” the local history centers at those libraries show up within the first six results. Is that true for your local history center?

Expertise
Google's a great place for most people to begin finding many kinds of information. Google Book Search will be a fine way to discover the more obscure portions of books, and obscure books in general. But librarians and library catalogs offer expertise—professional education and knowledge to guide users whose needs are out of the ordinary, and classification methods to support comprehensive retrieval and guide people to the materials they need.

It's silly to worry about Google serving people's everyday “reference” needs—you can't handle that volume in any case. Librarians should take over where web search doesn't work so well, and for people struggling with web search.

That does not mean ignoring Google or condemning it as unprofessional (a condemnation that's irrelevant for Google, since Google doesn't claim or intend to replace libraries and professional librarians). It does mean learning the strengths and weaknesses of Google just as you know the strengths and weaknesses of your online catalog and fee-based search tools, and it means being able to help patrons use it effectively and know when to ask the experts—the librarians.

Community
Good libraries aren't just local libraries. They're places that serve their communities in that regard. Good libraries build and preserve communities. “Cybercommunities” can be fascinating—but the physical community continues to be vital.

I live in a city where one of every 70 residents works for Google. What city could be more involved with cybercommunity? It's also a city of neighborhoods (more so than any city I've lived in), parks, civic involvement, lots of restaurants and coffee shops—and a heavily used library with meeting rooms, an award-winning teen zone, and other non-virtual places that strengthen its community.

My comments above about well-designed, discoverable web pages apply here as well. Don't be shy about your services and how your library functions in the community. Think about how your library can use web services and web search engines to help build your community. Consider the role of your “Friends” group and library foundation (if you have them) as ways to improve the library's role in the community and improve the community itself.

Is your “Friends” group on the web? Is the site discoverable and linked to and from the library's site? How about your foundation? How about schedules and reservation forms for your community meeting rooms? I assume schedules for story hours and other library programs are on your website in discoverable form. Is the same true for your other community services?

Use Google to strengthen your role in the community. Make sure your pages are discoverable. Make sure new residents and old neighbors know about the great things you do and how to support your activities.

Resources
Need I state the obvious? Google Book Search helps people discover books. Libraries help them read books.

You have the resources. Not just books, to be sure—but books still count for a lot, and will for decades to come. Those books are even organized so that a patron who's discovered one good possibility can browse related books.

You may be able to build a toolbar or widget so that every Google Book Search result will yield a “Find this book in a library” link. That will only help those patrons who download and use such a tool, and it really shouldn't be necessary (see the next section), but it may endear you to your most technologically inclined patrons.

It Works Both Ways
Being complementary works both ways. Google Book Search could stand some librarian-guided refinement. As part of that refinement, the public domain portion of the Google Books Library Project really should be working and partnering with the OCA and other public-domain book digitization projects. There's enough in Google Book Search already to spot three issues, two of which should be easy to remedy and not even controversial for Google's business model:
  • Many Google Book Search books published prior to 1923, necessarily in the public domain, show only snippets when they should show the whole book. The same is true for quite a few government publications that are almost certainly in the public domain within the U.S. That should never be the case.
  • There should be a “Find this book in a library” link for every book that originates in the Google Books Library Project and for every book in the public domain. That wasn't the case the last time I tried some date-limited searching.
  • Ideally, every result in Google Book Search should include a “Find this book in a library” link—after all, even books supplied by publishers show purchase links for sources other than the publisher itself. If Google Book Search is to be a great way to discover books, it should include all the great ways to get the books.

The web hasn't made you irrelevant. Google Book Search won't degrade your collections, although it could bring new users to your doors and increase circulation. Work from your strengths and see how to complement them with Google and other web resources. That's a win-win situation; it's how we all progress.

Response from the Editor
There are many organizations working on initiatives to scan public domain books (OCA, the Million Book Project, Google, Project Gutenberg, etc.), as well as many libraries that are digitizing their own public domain collections. However, according to an OCLC study, these public domain books represent only 20 percent of the world's books. Estimates put the percentage of books that are in print and available in bookstores at only 5 percent. This leaves 75 percent or more in what O'Reilly Media CEO and Publisher Tim O' Reilly calls the "Twilight Zone" – that is, they may no longer be in print, but since they were published after 1923, they may not yet be in the public domain. These books – the books you might find in your local library or used bookstore (but often nowhere else) – are an important focus of our digitization efforts at Google Book Search. That makes our project different from many others.

Why does this matter when considering our treatment of potentially public domain books? We want to encourage people to find books and authors to write more books, so we are very careful not to substitute for the sale of an in-copyright book. For that reason, though we digitize all books, including those in the "Twilight Zone," we display at most three snippets – a few sentences surrounding a user's search term -- so that a user can find the book and has a reason to go buy it or find it in a library. Since whether a book is in the public domain is a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain. These books may be in the public domain, but until we can be sure, we show them as if they are not.

The second factor is scale. We're working quickly to digitize and index as many books as possible so we can make Google Book Search truly comprehensive and useful. One way to treat digitized books that may be in the public domain would be to exclude them from the index until we were sure. However, our goal is to make the index as useful as possible, and that means including books as soon as we can rather than waiting for a perfect determination of public domain status.

What this means is that some books may initially show up in “Snippet View” and then later, be expanded to “Full View.” While we face challenges due to the scale of our project, we're working hard to make the verification process faster and more efficient, and we greatly appreciate your reports regarding specific books. So when you find a book that you believe “should” be in the public domain and all you can see are a few snippets, it's because we've chosen to make it searchable (we often say, “discoverable”) until we know for certain that it has entered the public domain and can be displayed in full. If you're able to provide proof that a book is in the public domain, please send it our way.

Finally, Walt's point regarding the “Find this book in a library” links is well taken. We completely agree. This feature isn't yet fully implemented on many Google Book Search pages, but it's certainly in the works. We'll be very happy on the day that we can finally announce that Google Book Search is fully “library search enabled.”

Walt Crawford is a senior analyst at RLG, just down the road from Google. He's also a frequent writer and occasional speaker on issues of libraries, policy, technology and media. In addition to columns for EContent and Online, he produces the free e-journal Cites & Insights and blogs at Walt at Random.