Risky or scared?

The UC Irvine librarian blog claimed that Google Print is risky echoing the sentiments of the Chronicle of Higher Education (paid sub. reqd).

The article states: "It pains me (author of article – j) to declare this: Google's Library Project is a risky deal for libraries, researchers, academics, and the public in general. However, it's actually not a bad deal for publishers and authors, despite their protestations."

As with a lot of things with Google Print, I think this is characterized by fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).

Has Google and other commercial search engines hindered the spread of knowledge? I would find it very hard-pressed to argue that - I'd go so far as to claim it does the exact opposite. Endeavors like CiteSeer have done more to advance to academic knowledge than any innovations that the libraries have introduced in the last 20 years.

Through search engines, people are more aware of what other people are doing. This is unequivocally positive.

As Girish has been constantly pointing out to me, all we have to do is to publish an ISR tech report on the website, wait a few months, go to Google, and we'll find a number of unscrupulous characters plagiarizing our work. My claim is that Girish is just trying to make this argument so we don't have to submit to conferences. Yet, in all seriousness, there's a real point here.

Girish used to post a collection of the papers that 'stole' from his papers outside his office, but he's now given up. He was worried at first that he would be accused of plagiarizing from some undergrad in Russia. In all of the papers we've written together, we agonize and argue over phrasings of the silliest things for hours. We probably spend more time on one sentence than the plagiarizers do on the entire cut-and-paste and submission.

The key to all of this is in the oft-talked about 'long tail'. It's no longer about visibility for your papers online - if people are copying it, they can clearly find it. Having effective search engines is a positive thing for legitimate researchers and one of the most positive research impacts of the World Wide Web. It should work both ways: you encourage dissemination of your work and then learn about others work through the Internet. As Kuhn argues so well, most research is evolutionary not revolutionary.

The public libraries, like UC, are constantly under space pressure to remove books from circulation. How is limiting and removing books a good thing? How is restricting information good? I am of the definite opinion that libraries will only be helped in the long run by letting people know what they have. They are a public service with the express intention to share knowledge. How does opening the content and knowledge within those books go against this policy? It doesn't. Academics consume knowledge to synthesize new ideas. Searching will allow us to be able to identify sources far quicker.

The next argument is whether Google should be the steward. We live in a free-market society. Why can't Microsoft do this? Why can't Yahoo do this? Clearly they can and probably already have plans to do so. And, if they do it better than Google does, the marketplace will follow. Connecting people with the information that they want (or don't even realize that they actually want!) is the goal of any search engine.

Now, in this discussion, I am clearly sidestepping the right of the copyright holder in restricting the proliferation of the materials. But, doesn't the library operate in the same way that the search engines does: they acquire a physical copy of a copyrighted work and then allow anyone to view it in person. How fundamentally different is the concept of a library from a search engine? Is it just accuracy and relevancy? How is improving that a risky thing?

Or, is it just a fear of commercialism? If these search companies can make a buck off it selling ads, fine by me. All I want is the information I'm looking for. If the ads are somehow relevant to what I'm looking for, I'll go click on the ads. Let the marketplace decide - not some scared people who fear what they likely can't understand.

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