COPYCENSE

“Daniel Clancy, the Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project, mentioned that Google [Book Search] was NOT going for archival quality in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned!

“The key point that I took away from this is that Google book project IS NOT an alternative to library/archive/archival/preservation scans. Libraries will still have an important role to play (as we already know!) because a certain percentage of the digitized content owned by StanMichOxYork will be basically unusable as archival, preservation-level digital content. Google’s ok with that, but libraries shouldn’t be!”

Diglet. Thoughts on Google Book Search. Feb. 16, 2006.

Editor’s Note: Digitization project expert Jill Hurst-Wahl discussed the poor quality of the Google Book Search scans last November.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.