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Opinion

Google helps provide online texts

Michael Goetz 
Opinion Columnist 

What is it about things that start with "G" and significant advances in literacy? That guy Gutenberg unleashed a can of worms on the unsuspecting lords by creating the printing press. The Greeks are responsible for not only logos for fraternities and sororities but also for much of our early foundations in written language. 

Now Google enters the arena with their latest "Don't be evil" project.

Google Books is attempting to do what Project Gutenberg failed to accomplish by digitally recording as many of the world's texts and putting them online. 

The popular search service launched the book search last year with the help of librarians from five major libraries -- the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.

Now the University of Wisconsin has joined the team by offering up a combined total of 7.2 million documents, one of the largest collections in the United States. The university librarians will be focusing their initial efforts on scanning early scientific works as well as medicinal history and early engineering texts.

Google has attracted the negative attention of authors and publisher groups over a fear of online delivery of copyrighted materials. Google has said that it has no plans to publish the full texts of copyrighted works but will instead act as a global card catalog that includes a short summary of the work and possible locations to purchase the books.

Google Books plans to offer older documents that are no longer under any copyright in a fully searchable database on the Internet. The benefits of such a task are so great that it can't even be measured. Digital texts provide no fear of natural degradation because of humidity or age. The search capabilities will give students and teachers all the benefits of a huge library from the comfort of their classrooms and homes.

Users hope this latest partner can encourage other universities and public libraries to take part in this project. Having a centralized location where anyone can access historical and scientific works from anywhere is no small feat. Fear of copyright infringement should not overtake the possible global benefit from participating.

Newer works should still be copyrighted but publishers should embrace this new technology and use it to their advantage. Offering people another place to see books is also free advertising. 

Imagine the undergraduate student looking for that one book for his term paper and finding it through this service complete with links for purchase close at hand.

Projects like this make you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. Internet advocates dream of these types of projects when they sleep at night. Not only does this enrich the education of Americans, it also betters the global community. Now if we can just get rid of all this porn.

Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu