KELLER: Despite digitizing,
books are here to stay.
Linda A. Cicero
want to pull a book off
the shelves of Green Library without leaving your office
chair? Soon, you will be able to—assuming its
copyright has expired.
Under a pilot program with Google, the web company founded
by former Stanford doctoral students Larry Page, MS
’98, and Sergey Brin, MS ’95, hundreds of
thousands (or more) of the University’s 7.5 million
books will be scanned, digitized and made searchable.
Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the
New York Public Library also have agreed to have some
or all of their volumes digitized. “Some people
seem to believe the effect will be to make the physical
books redundant—that we can simply discard the
books and convert our book stacks to offices and labs,”
says University librarian Michael Keller. “I disagree
strongly. In fact, I believe having books in digital
form will actually increase the use of the physical
books. The digital files will be great for searching
and targeting material for study, but many of us prefer
the hard-copy original in hand for careful reading.”
Stanford will loan books to Google, which will scan
them without removing bindings or harming the volumes,
then return them to campus to be reshelved. For copyrighted
works, Google will display bibliographic information
and tell the user how many times the search term appears
and on which pages. The search engine will provide complete
texts of older books that are in the public domain.
