Thursday, January 11, 2007

Searching Google Book Search and I found....

I did a search in Google Book Search on the word "digitization." One of the books that was retrieved was Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access written by Steven T Puglia, Jeffrey Reed, and Erin Rhodes. The full-text of this book is available because it was published with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license, even though it is copyrighted.

Now I think having the full-text available is very cool. I could see recommending that someone read the book at the Google web site IF the resolution was better. True, someone who is patient -- and doesn't mind fuzzy type -- could read the book through Google. More likely either a person would use it electronically to look up something specific in the book or they would order a hardcopy version.

So true to its mission, Google has allowed me to find a useful book and linked me to sources for obtaining a readable full-text. The user in me, though, wishes I could read it in Google. Would I be willing to pay something to see a clearer version of the book? Only if I could also download a copy to my hard drive, too. Maybe that is an option they are already considering?


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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could this be it?

http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/digitizing-archival-materials.pdf

Jill Hurst-Wahl said...

That seems to be it! So you can buy a copy from several booksellers, including the publisher, Digital Library Federation ($25.00), or you can download a very readable copy from NARA! Isn't it interesting that Google does not point you to the copy at NARA.

sharon said...

Whenever I see that something was published under a Creative Commons license, I assume that a free copy is available somewhere. This is based on a very small sample, so far: Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture," for example. Several science fiction authors are taking this route, too--see the article by Cory Doctorow in last month's Forbes Magazine titled "Giving It Away."