RE: Darnton on the Google settlement

["Rick Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> I need to reread the piece, but it
> does seem to omit any expression of gratitude towards Google for
> having stepped in where the public sector did not act or for
> having fought through the tangles of copyright to get to the
> settlement.

Sorry for submitting another lengthy rant (did you miss me?), but to
pursue Jim's point here for a second: the sourness with which many of us
have greeted the Google settlement is very disappointing.  Sometimes I
think we've actually made an art out of letting the perfect be the enemy
of the good.  Look at what the Google settlement has done: the general
public now has far better (though still imperfect) access to vastly more
literary and scientific writing than it ever has had before.  This
access is, by any sane definition of the term, free.  (More
comprehensive access is available at a price, but what's available at no
charge is still amazing.)  Even better, the content to which we now have
access is, for the first time ever, fully searchable, and we can get it
from our homes and around the clock.  Better still, the public has paid
virtually nothing in return for what it now gets -- Google elected to
absorb effectively all of the up-front costs and labor involved in this
remarkable project, gambling that it will recoup its investment later by
a combination of advertising, microcharges, and the brokering of book
purchases at radically discounted prices.

Are the access terms perfect?  Of course not.  It would be wonderful if
GBS actually covered everything ever published, if there were no
restrictions at all on downloading, if access to copyrighted
publications were provided under the same terms as access to
public-domain content, if there were no advertising involved, if Google
were a grassroots nonprofit collective devoted to developing alternative
energy sources and feeding abandoned cats, and if free access to massive
amounts of high-quality information automatically turned the general
public into sophisticated researchers.

But for crying out loud.  How fantastic does a gift have to be before we
can acknowledge that it's great?  Speaking as a librarian, I guess it
would be easier for us to do so if the fantastic deal didn't threaten
our own position in the scholarly marketplace.  But we'd better get used
to the threat and figure out how to reposition ourselves, because our
patrons need no convincing about what GBS can do for them -- and our
sour-faced attempts to convince them otherwise make us look not only
clueless, but also desperate and self-centered.  That's not a good image
for a publicly-funded service provider to project during a deep
recession.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
801-721-1687