| One of the things that surprises me most about reactions to the Google Library Project is that smart people whom I respect seem to think that the only reason that a university library would be involved with Google is because, in some combination, its leadership is stupid, evil, or at best intellectually lazy. To the contrary, although I may be proved wrong, I believe that the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better. Four years from now, all seven million volumes in the University of Michigan Libraries will have been digitized – the largest such library digitization project in history. Google Book Search and our own MBooks collection already provide full-text access to well over a hundred thousand public domain works, and make it possible to search for keywords and phrases within hundreds of thousands more in-copyright materials. This access is altering the way that we do research. At least as important, the project is itself an experiment in the provision and use of digitized print collections in large research libraries. I do not see how we can discover the best ways to use such collections without experiments at this scale. In sum, I believe that our library is doing exactly what it should do in the best interests of scholarship and our users, now and in the future. |
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