The blog Digitization 101 has an entry by Jill Hurst-Wahl titled http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2005/03/dont-get-goggle-eyed-over-googles-plan.html, which referenced an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is a little out-dated from March 11, 2005 but is very prevalent to what we discovered at Kirtas Technologies. The author states that we shouldn't throw away our library cards just yet because there are issues that have come up for Google. These include copyright, past failures, preserving books, Google's future, and ecological concerns. One thing that they are still failing to do is preservation of books, but from what we found out at Kirtas, Microsoft is doing everything it can to preserve the hard copy of the books they scan and are making the digitized files available for multi-use.
The blog quotes Mark Y. Herring, the author of the article, referring to the preservation of books: "My guess is that Google has underestimated, perhaps substantially, the percentage of books that will be damaged or that cannot undergo rapid digitization. Not only will some books be too fragile, or bound too tightly to lie flat, but even some newer books, owing to rapid manufacture, fall out of their bindings in 12 months or less. Handling -- even by careful digitizers -- will doubtless leave more than a few volumes without covers. Working with both groups of titles will increase Google's costs."
The blogger poses a question that is very interesting; she asks if Google will slow down the process and give libraries more of a thought once a fragile book is really harmed. I wonder if Google has realized what Microsoft has in its hands to digitize books without harming the books and retaining the original character of the books. From what we heard last Tuesday, they have not changed their digitization process, which means that the files created by Kirtas and Microsoft will be of much higher value to the world.
http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2005/03/dont-get-goggle-eyed-over-googles-plan.html