Gorman slams digitisation

Controversy has broken out over the Google digitisation project with Michael Gorman, outspoken head of the American Library Association , slammed it as a waste of money. Speaking at the Online Information Conference in London, Gorman also attacked librarians for being “too interested in technology”.

His comments have met with opposition from librarians. “The Google project has been enthusiastically embraced and I think that is a mistake. I am not speaking on behalf of the ALA. That has no position on the Google digitisation project. I, on the other hand, do,” said Gorman.

Gorman believes money is being wasted on digitising ( click here to read further news on Google digitisation ) an enormous number of scholarly texts that are rarely used at the moment. “So we digitise - I would prefer to say atomise. Very little-used books are reduced to a bunch of paragraphs, searchable by free text searching, the very worst kind of searching.”

His concerns about contextualisation, and the dangers of accessing parts of a book without reading the whole, are widely shared. But his views have also met high level resistance. Elizabeth Niggemann, head of the German National Library , said: “More digitisation is needed. If things are little used they a library catalogue or Amazon,” he said. He claimed that relevant books were likely to be relegated to lower search results pages, as they do not benefit from commercial search engine optimisation.

This was refuted by Google spokesman John Lewis Needam. “There is no search engine optimisation in the context of Book Search. For us it was a tremendous challenge taking books of 100-500 pages and judging the keywords,” he said.

Niggemann believes library users are turning to Google because although library catalogues are beingmade available via the internet and an increasing number of portals, the bibliographic information they provide is not enough. “We need catalogue enrichment with links, table and abstracts and we need more sophisticated retrieval systems that aremultilingual and intelligent.”

will be used less if they are available only in print.” Niggemann said the Conference of European National Librarians ( CENL ), which has developed the European Library portal access to digitised resources, is not against digitisation by Google or Yahoo.

“We would like to offer to work as much as we can with anyone who wants to spend money on that – private companies or the EU. Every digital itemis good for users out there as long as the rights owners are happy.”

But she warns that digitised assets need to be protected: “We need to get politicians involved (in digitisation) as commercial enterprises are
not interested in the long term.”

Gorman also criticised the Google Book Search facility for failing to locate its digitised books. “Google Book Search is not an effective way of finding books - it is better to go to a library catalogue or Amazon ,” he said ( click here to read about Amazon ). He claimed that relevant books were likely to be relegated to lower search results pages, as they do not benefit from commercial search engine optimisation.

This was refuted by Google spokesman John Lewis Needam. “There is no search e ngine optimisation in the context of Book Search. For us it was a tremendous challenge taking books of 100-500 pages and judging the keywords,” he said.

Niggemann believes library users are turning to Google because although library catalogues are being made available via the internet and an increasing number of portals, the bibliographic information they provide is not enough. “We need catalogue enrichment with links, table and abstracts and we need more sophisticated retrieval systems that are multilingual and intelligent.”

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