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Content

"When Randall C. Jimerson, the president of the Society of American Archivists, heard of Google's plan to convert certain holdings at Oxford University and at some of the leading research libraries in the United States into digital files, searchable over the Web, he asked, "What are they thinking?" Mr. Jimerson had worries. Who would select the material? How would it be organized and identified to avoid mountains of excerpts taken out of context? Would Google users eventually forgo the experience of holding a book or looking at a historicaldocument? But in recent interviews, many scholars and librarians applauded the announcement by Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, to digitize some of the collections at Oxford, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Harvard and the New York Public Library. The plan, in the words of Paul Duguid, information specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, will "blast wide open" the walls around the libraries of world-class institutions.
David Nasaw, a historian and director of the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, said the ability to use keywords to locate books and documents could save academics traveltime and money and broaden their research. "This all captures people's imagination in a wonderful way," Said Kate Wittenberg, director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University. "But whether it's right or wrong is not the whole question and not the whole answer." This year Ms. Wittenberg's group completed a three-year study of research habits that included 1,233 students. The study concluded that electronic resources had become the main tool for gathering information, particularly among undergraduates. But Ms. Wittenberg does have concerns. "What I've learned is that libraries help people formulate questions as well as find answers," Ms. Wittenberg said. "Who will do that in a virtual world?" On the other hand, she Said, an enhanced databank could make it easier for students to research topics across disciplines. For example, a topic like "climate change" touches an both political science and science, she Said, and "in the physical world, the books about them are in two different buildings at Columbia." Online research could bring the two subjects together instantly. Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton who is writing a book about the history of books, noted that by looking at a book's binding and paper quality, a researcher can discern much about the period in which it was published, the publisher and the intended audience.
"There may be some false consciousnesses about this breakthrough, that all learning will be at our fingertips," Mr. Darnton said of the plans to enhance Google's database. He saw room for both Google and real-world research. Libraries have already been changed by the Internet, said Paul LeClerc, president and chief executive of the New York Public Library: But libraries will still be needed to coliect and store information, he said. "TV did replace radio," Mr. LeCIerc said. "Videos and DVD's did not replace people going to the movies. It's still easier to read a book by hand than online." "The New-York Public Library Web site gets three-fourths of a billion hits a year from 200 different countries and territories, and that's with no marketing or advertising," he said. "That's the context in which this new element has to be placed." "We had 13 million reader visits last year," he continued. "We're serving a multiplicity of audiences - we serve people physically and virtually. It's an enormous contribution to human intellectual development." Many university leaders realize that for most people, information does not exist unless it is online, said Paul Courant, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan. Mr. Courant envisioned that in 20 years archives would be shared by institutions. While the world needs "tens of thousands of copies of 'To the Lighthouse,"' he said, "we don't need to have a zillion copies of some arcane monograph written by a sociologist in 1951."

Footnote

Beilage zur Süddeutschen Zeitung. - Vgl. auch die Notiz in: CD Info 2005, H.2, S.14: "Digitale Bibliotheken mit Google"