Researching Scanned Books
Last Sunday February 3, Professor Michael Hancher of the English Department at the University of Minnesota posted on the discussion list of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) a Call for Papers to be presented at a special session of the next Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention. The convention is scheduled for December 27-30, 2008 and will be held in San Francisco.
On behalf of SHARP, Hancher will propose a special session that he has titled “The Library of Google: Researching Scanned Books” and introduced as follows:
In the past several years Google, Microsoft, and the Internet Archive have made countless facsimile books readily available online, and also made them keyword-searchable. Millions more are forthcoming. Most public discussion of this massive innovation has circled around questions of copyright; relatively little attention has been given to how it changes the practice of literary research.
He then asked some key questions from the point of view of a literary scholar:
What difference does this new plenitude make? How trustworthy is it? How does it affect pedagogy? What responsibility do organizations like SHARP and the MLA have at this juncture?
At first I was very happy to discover a flurry of responses followed Hancher’s post but was quickly disappointed to find very little discussion about how people were finding and using the digitized books. Most of the posts repeated the litany of familiar problems. In case you have not discovered them on your own, these are the main grievances:
Many books well out of copyright are not displayed in Full View…The bibliographic (author, publisher, publication date, etc) information about many volumes is missing or incorrect…Volume and issue information for periodicals is not available; if it is given, the data is not reliable…The digitized image is poor quality and the text illegible…The Optical Character Recognition error rate for some languages remains high and the text uncorrected…Links to libraries, metadata are often mismatched…
We know all this—are there other concerns? How are they affecting your or your students’ research?
We are also very aware of the fear that once digitization is completed many of the original books will go into off-site storage or worse. As Robert B. Townsend noted in the April 30, 2007 online issue of the American historical Associations AHA Today significant historical documents are now online but incomplete and illegible. To lose the originals would be more than unfortunate.
For those of us working in libraries who are not only trying to correct the more disturbing errors but trying to sort out what to do first, we need more information about how the materials that we have already placed online are being used.
We would also like to know what books or authors you are rediscovering, finding for the first time, and HOW you found them. This is only part of what Hancher wants to get to.
We also would like to know IF you can even access these materials and under what conditions. A colleague who is doing research in Brazil finds it difficult to find cybercafés and when she does her connect time costs her US$5.00 per hour.
If you have less expensive or cost-free access, how is the availability of digitized materials affecting your research, your methods? Let us know if by any chance you have discovered new subjects or approaches.
If you would like to participate in this proposed special session, please send a brief abstract and a brief vita to Prof. Hancher by March 10, 2008.
