Google Book Search Database Halved By Removing Most Foreign Texts

The Wall Street Journal added some crucial context to discussion of the revised Google Book Search Settlement announced late Friday: it “would cut the number of works covered by the settlement by at least half by removing millions of foreign works.” (Only works from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada would be included.)

Librarian and consultant Karen Coyle commented, “This greatly changes the value of the institutional subscription for higher education, as well as the value of the ‘research corpus’ (essentially a database of the OCR’d texts that researchers can use for computational research)… As it is, too many Americans are unaware of the world outside of those Anglo-American borders. This will just exacerbate that problem.”

Seen at Library Journal

Notes

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