Joy Weese Moll, a soon-to-be graduate of the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri, and author of the blog Wanderings of a Student Librarian, has written a useful overview of Google’s Print and Scholar initiatives – actually a session report from the Association of College & Research Libraries conference earlier this month. Summarized by Moll are suprisingly harmonious remarks by Adam Smith, product manager for Google’s library-related projects, and John Price Wilkin, a top librarian at the University of Michigan (and one of Google’s pilot partners).
“Smith made it very clear that this project is in its infancy. Google considers itself to be an international company and intends to participate in digitization projects in other countries and other languages. Smith acknowledged that Google cannot digitize everything. Rather, Google wants to be a catalyst for digitization efforts, not the only game in town. Google’s digitization project will help them build tools that will improve the searching of digital libraries created by universities, governments, and other organizations.”
Among other things, Wilkin points out that the mass digitization library collections “has already proven to be a factor in driving clarification of intellectual property rights, including the orphan copyright issue.”
Published in Cites and Insights. Link via Bibliotheke.