It is almost a year to the day since Google announced its plans to digitize the collections of five of the worlds great libraries through it’s Google Print Library service. When complete, the project will allow anyone anywhere to search for books using Google Book Search which, like the standard search engine, will return indexed results that provide basic information about each book plus a few snippets from its pages.
Google says its aim is ‘to make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print – while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.’ But the proposals have attracted a much-publicised lawsuit from the United States Authors Guild and are of concern to librarians worried the search engine’s easy-to-use search style will make users reluctant to conduct searches using more complex strategies to obtain better results.
