I am under embargo* on the details of this until later tonight, but this just came to me without me asking from a very reliable source. To honor the embargo, I will reserve my analysis and thoughts for later, and simply reprint the text of a note which was sent to certain parties at Harvard today. It describes what has been called (by the NYT) “Project Ocean” – a pilot project to scan and make searchable the contents of some of the world’s most prestigious libraries. I went into some of the issues this raises toward the bottom of this recent post (where I talk about Google Print). For the entire text of the email, click on the extended entry. Snippets:
As all of us know, Harvard’s is the world’s
preeminent university library. Its holdings of over 15 million volumes
are the result of nearly four centuries of thoughtful and comprehensive
collecting. While those holdings are of primary importance to Harvard
students and faculty, we have, for several years, been considering ways
to make the collections more useful and accessible to scholars around
the world….
Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could
harness Google’s search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and
the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find
materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate
with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of
the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system.
Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in
the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects
with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public
Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program
with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu….
If the pilot is deemed successful, Harvard will explore a long-term program with Google through
which the vast majority of the University’s library books would be digitized and
included in Google’s searchable database. Google will bear the direct costs of
digitization in the pilot project….
* To be clear, my rules on embargos are this: I promise not to report anything I’ve been told by the organization that requests the embargo until the embargo time, but if similar information comes to me through third party sources, I will report that information. I will not, however, use that third party information as an excuse to disclose any information still under embargo.
]]>
