I am highly skeptical of the opt in system because I think it may do an equal amount of damage and good when I consider a patron’s point of view in finding information. We need to aproach these kind of projects with ‘Tennant’s Law‘ in mind: “Only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find.”

I question the utility of a service that, in effect, says, “Here you go: search an arbitrary portion of our collection.” This type of collection is arbitrary because the criteria for being able to search it is not based on the collection decisions of a library and the entire process that is involved, which includes consultation with faculty and student input.

Instead the criteria for inclusion and searchability is based on the financial whims of publishers decisions to opt in. I think it is a disservice to our users because frankly the average patron will not care about the politics, copyright and power plays that go into the decision to join such a project. What we have here is a project that aims “to build something which enables the libraries to identify instantly what’s in there and what’s not in there” (quote from the article Dave linked above). This is blatant false advertising and I worry that from a user point of view they will assume that the service is a search of a library’s entire collection.

Therefore, I think we will end up with the daunting task of explaining to our patrons why this new service, under the guise of an exhaustive search of our collection, does not actually conduct an exhaustive search of our collection. And why didn’t it provide an exhaustive search, the patron would rightly ask. Well, the librarian explains, the world of information is complex and involves many different stake holders… Eyes begin glazing over. Managing the complexity and stake holders and providing access to library materials is our job as librarians. Working with the texts and analyzing the content is the patron’s job.

Notice, that for all of their flaws, our OPACs at least provide searching across an entire collection. If we are going to transition from metadata-based OPAC searching to full text inside the book searching, this is an aspect of the search I do not think we can give up: indiscriminate searching across a library’s full collection.

Steve -

I think Google and Yahoo! are not necessarily trying to replicate a library’s collection. Maybe I’m wrong? What they’re doing is drawing on library collections to create an independent collection which differs substantially from the various individual collections which comprise them.

Example: if Yahoo! draws on Berkeley and Toronto, they are not attempting to be a holistic representation of either Berkeley or Toronto’s holdings. They’re attempting to create a hybrid that draws from both in order to create a bigger, badder collection that is superior to both individuals. We won’t have to explain to patrons that all of Berkeley is not included, because they simply won’t think of Berkeley at all. Google Print, in effect, will be either, A) an index that points to bibliographic citations and not single holdings, or B) its own digital library.

And yes, with projects that are so vast, collection development goes straight out the window. There’s no doubt about that. But I haven’t heard a peep about collection development from Google or Yahoo! anyway. Has there been a peep?

Whose students and faculty would we consult anyway? Certainly the research interests and value judgments of students and faculty at Berkeley are different from those at Toronto. And Google and Yahoo! are not for these constituencies in particular – they’re for a vague, shadowy, worldwide group of readers from Australia to Memphis.

Not to be too combative, but I also think that your reference to the “financial whims of publishers” is incredibly flip, and it surprises me to hear that dismissive language from a librarian. My god Steve, librarians collect materials and provide access to them, we don’t change the laws and purposefully injure the industries that provide those materials just to make fulltext databases.

In an ideal world, scholars and publishers would not need money to survive. But the fact is, everything is financial. There is no free exchange of information and there never will be. Google recognizes that; Yahoo! recognizes it. They stand to make a lot of money here, but don’t want to share the bling with the creators of that information.

You can point to SPARC and other scholarly initiatives, but those are infant initiatives and aren’t a reality yet.

I hope this post doesn’t sound needlessly argumentative. I’m just trying to tease out and think through responses to this complicated matter and try to understand the many players (companies, libraries, librarians, researchers, publishers, authors, Joe Schmoes) who are involved.