Jean-Noël Jeanneney's critique of Google: Private sector book digitization and digital library policy

D-Lib Magazine

Volumn 12, Issue 12, 2006, Pages

  Bearman, David ^a  

^a Archives and Museum Informatics

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33845600229     PISSN: None     EISSN: 10829873     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1045/december2006-bearman     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe, by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, translated by Teresa Lavendar Fagan (University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London) 2006, 92p. [Originally published in April 2005 as Quand Google défie l'Europe: Plaidoyer pour un sursaut].
2. These criticisms apply equally, of course, to Microsoft Live Book Search or other forprofit digitizers insofar as they follow the same policies as Google.
3. Saturday, January 22, 2005 "Quand Google defie l'Europe" 〈http://www.lemonde.fr/cgibin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES& type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=885549〉.
4. UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 2001, 〈http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001271/127160m.pdf〉.
5. On p.11, Jeanneney recounts searching Google Books in May 2005 for Victor Hugo, Dante, Cervantes and Goethe and finding only English language translations of the literary titans of each of these major European languages.
6. Staff of the BNF pointed to numerous examples of scans with significant quality control problems from works of great significance to French culture. Notre Dame de Paris 〈http://books.google.fr/books?vid=OCLC43584919&id= 24roxJbSKGMC&pg=PT15&dq=hugo&as_brr=1〉
7. Gargantua 〈http://books.google.fr/books?vid= 0sAgGX5Bn27YTMoEpW&id=Gu4S_YWC3mEC&pg=RA7-PP1&lpg=RA2PR11&dq= gargantua〉
8. Promenades d'un rêveur solitaire 〈http://books.google.fr/ books?vid=0nUhc6wl87o2AO67Dk&id=ll8FAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA2-PA341&lpg= RA1-PA1&dq=rousseau〉 In the case of the "Histoire de la Revolution de France" retrieved in my search (in fn 10 below), I got only as far as page 23 in a poorly scanned book before reaching the first page that was completely illegible because the operator had moved the page during the scanning process. A random sample persuaded me that the problem is widespread, but it probably isn't culturally biased. Google's scanning process seems to be an equal opportunity book defacer - looking to see if important American authors were better treated, I randomly selected Emerson's Essays digitized by Google from a Harvard copy and found >5% of the pages were partly illegible to a person and probably more than 10% would be partly illegible in OCR.
9. Gorman, Michael, LA Times December 17, 2004 "books are designed to be read sequentially and cumulatively".
10. This search, repeated by the author on October 21, 2006, for "Miguel de Cervantes" produced the first Spanish language text in the third screen, so it may be that as Google Book Search grows the bias identified by proponents of cultural diversity increases!
11. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe, p.70-71.
12. th page, preceded by more than 50 English language books that did not use the term with an accent at all!
13. See the University of California/Google agreement at 〈http://www. cdlib.org/news/ucgoogle_cooperative_agreement.pdf〉. The University of Michigan contract, 〈http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/um-google-cooperative- agreement.pdf〉 seems much more sensitive on both points of selection and long-term rights.
14. Download a full-text from Google and you get a cover page trying to justify why they have placed technical restrictions on automated querying and restrict you to personal, noncommercial uses and to including their "watermark" on each page.
15. The first principle for participation is "The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the rights of content owners and contributors." 〈http://www.opencontentalliance.org/participate.html〉.
16. The St. Petersburg working group made this recommendation, and several others advocated in David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, "Converting Scanned Images of the Print History of the World to Knowledge: A Reference Model and Research Strategy", Russian Digital Libraries Journal, 2005, Vol. 8 # 5 〈http://www.elbib.ru/index.phtml?page=elbib/eng/journal/2005/part5/ BT〉, to the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis last summer, but no action was taken.
17. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe, p.80.
18. American readers will be jarred by the segue from the Million Books project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to the unrelated Mellon Foundation in New York, p.37. In addition it lacks the benefit of an index, and suffers from poor translation of important technical distinctions, further confusing Jeanneney's already problematic discussion of digital imaging, scanning and OCR on p.54, for example.
19. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe, p. xii.