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Showing posts from August, 2012

Google Book Search Project

This morning I was reading an interesting blog post by Karen Coyle about the Google Book Search Project ( http://kcoyle.blogspot.ca/2012/07/fair-use-deja-vu.html ).  Apparently Google filed a case that claimed that digitizing a book in order to make it searchable is "fair use" and thus legal in the U.S. as long as proper precautions are taken to ensure that this digitization doesn't essentially make an entire copyrighted book or substantial sections of it free to use and download. One of the arguments made by Google is that full text searching is far superior to searching using library catalogues.  Karen argues that this is essentially "throwing libraries under the bus".  She says that full text searching should be seen as complimentary to "standards based metadata", not a superior replacement for it.  I agree with her.  When I used to do a lot of reference work I found that there were times when full text searching was critical.  For example, a patr