It is hard to imagine a Microsoft venture falling under the weight of a competitor. But that's the post-mortem offered by many academic librarians as they ponder the software giant's recent and sudden announcement that it is shutting down its book-digitization project. The librarians' conclusion: Google did it....
Microsoft entered the scholarly digitization arena in October 2005, 10 months after Google did, and has been playing catch-up ever since.
Microsoft was not as ambitious as Google in the volume of material it sought to digitize and was not willing to devote as much money to the endeavor, librarians say....
"Microsoft was a little slower off the mark than Google," says Anne R. Kenney, university librarian at Cornell University. Her library has supplied both Microsoft and Google with books and articles for digitization. "It would have meant an awful lot of additional investment in this area for Microsoft to be a real competitor."
Still, she and other librarians say Microsoft's retreat from book digitization is a setback for the preservation of books. Many academic libraries will have to scramble to find other sources of money to make their books available online, they add. And Google, which restricts the public institutions that can use its scans and has also been accused of copyright infringement for some of its scanning activity, may not be a satisfactory alternative....
Microsoft is still scanning parts of Cornell's collection. Between 90,000 and 100,000 books will be digitized by the time Microsoft ends the program, probably this summer, says Ms. Kenney.
An additional half-million books and journals at Cornell will be digitized under a newer agreement the university has with Google....
Ms. Kenney says Google's strategy [to include copyrighted works] is one reason Cornell decided to form a partnership with the company. Cornell has a large agricultural-life-sciences collection that is under copyright but needs to be digitized, and Microsoft would not work on copyrighted material, she said. Another reason: Microsoft focused only on English-language materials, whereas Google is digitizing works in other languages. And Microsoft focused on books, while Google works on more journals....
The University of Toronto, one Microsoft partner, is reluctant to sign on with Google. That company does not allow its scanned works to be shared freely among public libraries, and sharing with the public is one of the university's goals, says Carole R. Moore, the university's chief librarian.
Microsoft digitized about 120,000 volumes from Toronto's libraries.
"We hope to double that," she said. "We're looking for other funding sources."
Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, says much of his group's membership will also be scurrying to find new partners to help pay for digitizing books....
Indeed, some librarians say Microsoft's decision could come with a silver lining, forcing a larger and more diverse group of players to get involved in digitization.
"We've got to get help from many different angles," said Brewster Kahle, who recruited Microsoft and Yahoo to support the Open Content Alliance, the nonprofit book-digitization project he leads. "Microsoft has given us a great kick-start."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/29/2008 11:20:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
