If you’re in the Bay Area and you want a full day of wonky debate, check out UC Berkeley’s Google Books Conference. It features panels on how the Google Books settlement affect data mining, privacy, information quality and public access.
The conference comes hard on the heels of the formation of the Open Book Alliance, an organization driven by the Internet Archive and including Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as library and small publishing groups among its members. Most of the speakers are opposed to the deal but Google’s Tom Clancy will be there to make the company’s argument.
[Snip]
[Our emphasis]
But if Google is the last library, as Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg says, it’s a pretty bad one. That means serious library science must be applied to the online collection before we should outsource the history of human (or at least Western) knowledge to Google:
Google Book Search is almost laughably unusable for serious research, UC Berkeley’s Nunberg said. For example, he pointed out that the Charles Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities” is listed in Google Book Search as having been published in 1800; Dickens was born in 1812.
Here’s the complete program for August 28, 2009 Conference
Source: ZDNet
Following the conference, video of the sessions will be available online, for those who were unable to attend.
See Also: EDUCAUSE LIVE: The Google Book Scanning Project: Issues and Updates
Free. Registration required. This event is scheduled for September 2, 2009.
UPDATE: Sony and Amazon to Face Off Over Google Books Deal
This article from August 28, 2009 in The New York Times.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 and is filed under Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property, Privacy.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.