One of my favorite blogs is the Institute for the Future of the Book, if:book as it's called, which I read every time it's updated. So I learned last week that Siva Vaidhyanathan would be joining the Institute as its first fellow. Siva is also moving from his current home in NYC to the University of Virginia. You can read the institute's note about this as well as Siva's notes about a keynote address he gave recently where he outlines (and, actually, people blogging his speech in real time outline for us) his evolving criticisms about the Google Book Search project. For earlier expositions of Siva's thoughts on these matters, you can review any number of web postings, among them an April post from the ACRLog site, Siva Vaidhyanathan questions Google Book Search. The comments are worth a read also.
Siva is working on a book on this subject, and therein lies an intriguing opportunity. The Institute for the Future of the Book hosts several experimental new forms of networked expression (new books). The if:book note indicates,
"we will be a launching a new website devoted to Siva's latest book project, The Googlization of Everything, an examination of Google's disruptive effects on culture, commerce and community."
Hopefully this means that Siva's ideas will be presented in a way that those of us in the community who do not fully understand his criticisms will have a chance to question and engage him more fully in a discussion of his concerns than we usually can in the hurried conversations that we may have at the close of his excellent speeches. I certainly do look forward to that possibility. I've read much that he's written about his concerns over the last 2 years, and I still am not convinced that he's entirely right about this. When his book site launches, I'll post a note here, and I would urge Collectanea readers to include the book site in your rss feeds. It ought to be a very interesting and active discussion forum.
Ironically, if:book posted just last Wednesday a sort of counterpoint to Siva's concern that Google "controls too much knowledge," noting that the Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance had launched a demo version of Open Library,
"a grand project that aims to build a universally accessible and publicly editable directory of all books: one wiki page per book, integrating publisher and library catalogs, metadata, reader reviews, links to retailers and relevant Web content, and a menu of editions in multiple formats, both digital and print."
Additionally, Mike Madison, at madisonian.net, in commenting upon Siva's concerns, says,
"One reason I have been less skeptical of Google than Siva (among others) is my confidence that Google — while hardly a savior, and deserving scrutiny — isn’t the end game."
One final quote from Ben Vershbow about the Open Library project, because this is such an exciting idea and I hope you'll go read the entire post:
"Building an open source library catalog is a mammoth undertaking and will rely on millions of hours of volunteer labor, and like Wikipedia it has its fair share of built-in contradictions. Jessamyn West of librarian.net put it succinctly:
"It’s a weird juxtaposition, the idea of authority and the idea of a collaborative project that anyone can work on and modify."But the only realistic alternative may well be the library that Google is building, a proprietary database full of low-quality digital copies, a semi-accessible public domain prohibitively difficult to use or repurpose outside the Google reading room, a balkanized landscape of partner libraries and institutions left in its wake, each clutching their small slice of the digitized pie while the whole belongs only to Google, all of it geared ultimately not to readers, researchers and citizens but to consumers. Construed more broadly to include not just books but web pages, videos, images, maps etc., the Google library is a place built by us but not owned by us. We create and upload much of the content, we hand-make the links and run the search queries that program the Google brain. But all of this is captured and funneled into Google dollars and AdSense. If passive labor can build something so powerful, what might active, voluntary labor be able to achieve? Open Library aims to find out."
Nice gig, Siva! Congratulations!
