LIBRARIES RESISTING GOOGLE'S COMPUTER DATABAS, PREFERING A NON-PROFIT

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KATIE HAFNER, NY TIMES - Several major research libraries have rebuffed
offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer
databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want
to place on the new digital collections. Skip to next paragraph Robert
Spencer for The New York Times. The research libraries, including a
large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the
Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their
materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms,
which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search
services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it
converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is
making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the
resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more
useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned
again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a
cost shared by the group's members and benefactors, so there are obvious
financial benefits to libraries of Google's wide-ranging offer, started
in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google's offer — including the
New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan,
Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books
from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library
and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and
nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global
repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or
restrictions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html?hp

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