Hail the Google Books!
By Paul
“In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia decimated cultural institutions throughout the country. Khmer Rouge fighters took over the National Library, throwing books into the street and burning them, while using the empty stacks as a pigsty. Less than 20 percent of the library-home for Cambodia’s rich cultural heritage- survived.”
- University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman
A new feature of the Google’s Book Search makes out-of-copyright works available for downloading and printing.
Juan Cole raises a couple of problems with Google Book project;
“One problem: I am already finding poorly done books, where every other page is blurred beyond reading. This is very bad because I don't know when it would ever be corrected, and no one would have an incentive to carry out this sort of project once Google has…A second, general problem with Google is that on the whole it is no good at searching by date. Why is that so hard to put in a search engine? Is it that programmers just don't appreciate the desirability of being able to study instances of the word "liberte" in France, 1700-1789? You can put dates in the searches, but in my experience that doesn't return satisfactory results. If Google wants the project to have maximum impact, they need to address this problem. (It would be nice to address it in their general web search engine, too. Have you ever tried to find a document put up on the Web in 1998, where you don't remember whole search strings?) Otherwise, I see a business opportunity for a historian who has good programming skills…”
Related;
Google, the Khmer Rouge and the Public Good; Mary Sue Coleman’s speech- highly recommended, gives also a history of JSTORE.
Overselling the Web: Development and the Internet- a new book that is coming up, published by a World Bank economist, Charles Kenny.
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