These problems are exacerbated by Google’s rather peculiar views on copyright. While taking an expansive view of copyright for recent works, it has taken a very narrow view about books that actually are in the public domain. As I have always understood it (and the U.S. Copyright Office confirms), “works by the U.S. government are not eligible for U.S. copyright protection.” But Google locks all government documents published after 1923 1922* behind the same wall as any other copyrighted work. Among other things, that locks up works that should be in the public domain, such as the AHA’s Annual Report (published by the Government Printing Office from 1890 to 1993) and circulars from the U.S. Bureau of Education. This problem is exacerbated by the often errant data about when these materials were published—which places these works even further beyond reach.
For more than a year now, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar at New York University, has been objecting that the rush to digitize is moving far in advance of considered thought. His concerns seemed rather abstract when I first heard them last year, but working with Google Books over the past few months made his objections seem much more tangible and worrying.
What particularly troubles me is the likelihood that these problems will just be compounded over time. From my own modest experience here at the AHA, I know how hard it is to go back and correct mistakes online when the imperative is always to move forward, to add content and inevitably pile more mistakes on top of the ones already buried one or two layers down. With Google adding in more than 3,000 new books each day, the growth in the number of mistakes seems that much higher.
The problem of quality control only exacerbates my most basic worry about the larger rush to digitize every scrap of information—that we are adding to the pile much faster than the technology can advance to extract the information in a useful or meaningful way. When I have asked people who know a lot more about the technology than me about this problem, they tend to wave their hand and mumble about “brilliant scientists” and “technological progress.” Forgive me if I remain unconvinced. Even for someone fairly proficient in Boolean search terms I find a lot of the results from Google Books (and Google more generally) just page after page of useless and irrelevant information. I find it increasingly hard to believe that Google can add tens of thousands of additional books each month to the information pile—many containing basic mistakes in content and metadata—and the information results will actually grow better over time.
So I have to ask, what’s the rush? In Google’s case the answer seems clear enough. Like any large corporation with a lot of excess cash the company seems bent on
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new york escorts bury the originals in a dark archive (or the dumpster)? And what is the cost to historical thinking if the only substantive information one can glean out of Google is precisely the kind of narrow facts and dates that make history classes such a bore? The future will be here soon enough. Shouldn’t we make sure we will be happy when we get there?
