Surveys were administered to 1,060 students, then a subset of 102 students were observed and interviewed as they searched for information on the internet. In the survey students were asked to rate criteria they use for evaluating websites and how often they use those criteria when doing research for their coursework. Students rated several criteria as important to consider when searching for information for school assignments, including currency/timeliness, checking additional sources to verify the information, identifying opinion versus fact, and identifying the author of the website.

However, while students surveyed and interviewed know that they should assess the credibility of information sources they find on the web, in practice this didn’t always hold true. When researchers observed students searching for information, the students rarely assessed the credibility of websites using what faculty and librarians would consider appropriate criteria, e.g., examining author credentials, checking references, etc. Instead, they placed much trust in familiar brands: Google, Yahoo!, SparkNotes, MapQuest, and Microsoft, among others.

Students also invested their trust in search engines to provide them with the “best” results for their research needs. While some acknowledged that search engine results are not ranked by credibility or accuracy, they asserted that in their experience the top results returned by search engines were usually the most relevant for them. Adding to the confusion, some students went right to the sponsored links on the search engine results page, which are not organic results at all but paid advertising.

Some of the students interviewed were able to differentiate between the types of information usually found on websites based on domain name, remarking that websites with .edu and .gov addresses are most trustworthy. But students were less clear on the differences between .org and .com. Many regard .org websites as more trustworthy, probably because originally that domain was reserved for non-profit organizations, a restriction which no longer exists.

I highly recommend giving this article a read, as it’s full of additional data and details that I’m sure will resonate with academic librarians. For me reading this article was like stepping into one of my English Comp instruction sessions. I always devote a portion of the class to discussing doing research on the internet, often ask students these same questions, and (usually) get the same responses. It’s great to see published data on these issues, and I hope the article is widely read throughout higher ed. My one wish is that there were a way to comment directly on the article and remind faculty that librarians can collaborate with them to strengthen their students’ website evaluation skills.

Samuelson and her co-authors note that several provisions of the proposed Google B.S. settlement “seem to run contrary to scholarly norms and open-access policies that we think are widely shared in scholarly communities.” In the Chronicle’s report of their concerns, one can see the potential benefit on campus of a robust scholarly communications education program, i.e., one that engages librarians, faculty members, graduate students, and others (e.g., University Press, Graduate College, Office of Research) in a discussion of issues such as author rights, copyright management, open access policies and publishing, and the library and the press and the leaders of scholarly societies and professional associations (who are also often on our campuses) as the pillars supporting a new vision of the university’s role in the dissemination of research and scholarship.

Is Samuelson right? Is there “widespread ignorance” on your campus regarding the implications of the Google Book Search settlement? Is this part of a broader “teachable moment” on your campus on scholarly communication issues and the resources that your library is ready to put in play to help faculty to better understand these issues and to understand both the potential of large-scale digitization programs for enhancing discovery of scholarly materials, and the implications that taking one or another direction on those programs may have for the process of scholarly communication? Will you be taking advantage of that teachable moment?

Quick quiz: when Google Scholar went live, many information literacy instruction programs began to offer workshops on how to use Google Scholar as part of the research process; how many of you with scholarly communication education programs are planning (or have already conducted) workshops on the broader implications of Google Book Search for local understanding of author rights, open access alternatives, use of Creative Commons, etc.? Have you shared resources such as ARL’s Guide for the Perplexed? Who have been your campus partners in developing such programs?

We’re academic librarians. “Widespread ignorance” is something we should be able to help to address!

First of all, as Jeffrey Toobin predicted in his 2007 New Yorker article, “Google’s Moon Shot,” the fair use question remains unsettled. Anyone else who tries to follow in Google’s footsteps to digitize in-copyright books had better have a many millions of dollars handy to pay lawyers fees. This puts Google in an incredibly strong position. They will have a lock on great big digitized book collections. They have overnight become an enormous vendor of licensed content. And a huge product with no competitors can set the agenda. Did the libraries who jumped on this bandwagon foresee this outcome? Are they happy with it?

Paul Courant of UMich sees the positive side.

First, and foremost, the settlement continues to allow the libraries to retain control of digital copies of works that Google has scanned in connection with the digitization projects. We continue to be responsible for our own collections. Moreover, we will be able to make research uses of our own collections. The huge investments that universities have made in their libraries over a century and more will continue to benefit those universities and the academy more broadly.

Second, the settlement provides a mechanism that will make these collections widely available. Many, including me, would have been delighted if the outcome of the lawsuit had been a ringing affirmation of the fair use rights that Google had asserted as a defense. (My inexpert opinion is that Google’s position would and should have prevailed.) But even a win for Google would have left the libraries unable to have full use of their digitized collections of in-copyright materials on behalf of their own campuses or the broader public. . . . The settlement cuts through this morass. As the product develops, academic libraries will be able to license not only their own digitized works but everyone else’s. Michigan’s faculty and students will be able to read Stanford and California’s digitized books, as well as Michigan’s own. I never doubted that we were going to have to pay rightsholders in order to have reading access to digitized copies of works that are in-copyright. Under the settlement, academic libraries will pay, but will do so without having to bear large and repeated transaction costs. (Of course, saving on transaction costs won’t be of much value if the basic price is too high, but I expect that the prices will be reasonable, both because there is helpful language in the settlement and because of my reading of the relevant markets.)

Harvard is not so sanguine, according to a story in the Chron. They didn’t allow Google to digitize in-copyright books, and they will stick with that practice.

Harvard’s concerns center on access to the scanned texts — how widely available access would be and how much it might cost. “As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff.

He noted that “the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.” He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.”

Lawrence Lessig thinks there’s a lot that’s good about the settlement. We dodged the bullet of a loss on the fair use issue and improved on what was available in Google Books previously without shrinking the definition of fair use:

IMHO, this is a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic. The Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have settled for terms that will assure greater access to these materials than would have been the case had Google prevailed. Under the agreement, 20% of any work not opting out will be available freely; full access can be purchased for a fee. That secures more access for this class of out-of-print but presumptively-under-copyright works than Google was initially proposing. And as this constitutes up to 75% of the books in the libraries to be scanned, that is hugely important and good. That’s good news for Google, and the AAP/Authors Guild, and the public.

Andrew Keen isn’t so sure – as he writes in The Independent, “Will Life on Planet Google be a Nightmare or a Dream?” (And he is one of a few who consider the privacy issues – once a closely guarded value of libraries. We don’t think anyone should keep an eye on what you read. Unless it’s Uncle Google.)

Is Google good or is it evil? Is the company an all-knowing behemoth that is hubristically “transforming our lives”, Big Brother-style, with its intrusive technology? Or is it a plucky, selfless Silicon Valley start-up that is “audaciously” organising all the world’s information for all of our benefit? Is Google Orwell or is it Disney? . . .

The truth — and even on planet Google there remain truths – is that Google’s greed for knowledge is both thrillingly audacious and terrifyingly threatening. Google is, in fact, an Orwell-Disney co-production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101, then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at the click of a mouse, know all there is to know about ourselves, our neighbours and the world.

Brewster Kahle, not surprisingly, told the Mercury News this is a bad move. “When Google started out, they pointed people to other people’s content,” Kahle said. “Now they’re breaking the model of the Web. They’re like the bad old days of AOL, trying to build a walled garden of content that you have to pay to see.” Of course our libraries are full of enormously expensive walled gardens. And with this settlement we’ll have one more to tend. A big one. A big one with no serious competitors.

While Lessig is cheered that this settlement may well torpedo the flawed orphan works legislation pending in Congress, Georgia Harper encourages libraries to keep working on alternatives to the Google orphanage.

This isn’t the Congressional approach to problem solving (shove the parties into a room and lock the door until they have reached an agreement — and may the strongest interest obliterate the weaker and we’ll call it a compromise in the public interest). This is the publisher’s and Google’s no nonsense business approach: “Hey, let’s just start selling all the books and if there’s money to be made, the owners will either show up to claim it, or the money will lie there for 5 years while we give everyone time to wake up and smell the coffee. At the end of 5 years, we’ll pretty much know what’s orphan and what’s not. What’s not to like?” . . .

Google clearly understood and accepted that this plan was based on an idea I found repugnant: if orphan works don’t have owners, by definition, then why is it that the Registry should keep the money that comes in for books that ultimately no one claims? The publishers and authors just don’t see orphans as really belonging to everyone in the absence of an owner. They see them as belonging to all the other authors and publishers, but not the public. . . .

I want this process to work. I think it has a much better chance of working than that piece of, uh, than that piece of legislation that nearly passed earlier this fall. It doesn’t give us an answer today and it *only* deals with books, so it’s not a comprehensive solution, but it might serve as an example of what works, assuming it does work. But libraries can still do their own research on individual titles that they think may be orphans while we wait for this deal’s market incentives to do their job, and for it to become clear that transparency is in the owners’ best interests as well as the public’s.

For example, I believe that the OCLC’s Copyright Evidence Registry is just as important today as it was 5 days ago before Google announced this deal. Although the publisher/author Registry has potential to be definitive, there will be need for multiple sources of information about the copyright status of works until the publisher/author Registry earns its keep. No source that wants to be definitive can do so if it can’t be trusted.

James Gibson wraps up his analysis in the Washington Post –

By settling the case, Google has made it much more difficult for others to compete with its Book Search service. Of course, Google was already in a dominant position because few companies have the resources to scan all those millions of books. But even fewer have the additional funds needed to pay fees to all those copyright owners. The licenses are essentially a barrier to entry, and it’s possible that only Google will be able to surmount that barrier.

Sure, Google now has to share its profits with publishers. But when a company has no competitors, there are plenty of profits to share.

For more commentary, see the round-ups provided by Library Journal, Peter Suber, and EFF.

UPDATE: Library Journal on not holding our breaths; Peter Brantley on the stinginess of the public library provision.

photo courtesy of stevecadman

Siva is unique in that he combines an in-depth knowledge of copyright, a reasoned appreciation for new technology and a clear love and deep respect for libraries and librarians with a strong sense of social justice and the public good. He is a skilled presenter and powerful speaker. Others wear suits, he wears a black leather jacket. He tends to raise difficult questions. Either we should feel very lucky that he has chosen to cast his critical eye on our issues, or we should feel slightly nervous.

He began by dismissing both Kevin Kelly’s overenthusiastic embrace of the universal library and John Updike’s nostalgic defense of the traditional publishing world. He agreed with Kelly that digitization was a worthwhile goal but asked if Google Book Search was the right way to do it, if now was the right time, and if copyright was up to the task. He also disagreed with Kelly by countering that books are linear for a reason. He conceded that people of the book are racked with anxiety about the future, implying that this may have been a motivating factor pushing libraries into too hasty deals with Google.

Among Vaidhyanathan’s concerns about Google Book Search include some nitty gritty quality issues about the improper ranking and the inadequacy of some search results. He pointed to a search for “copyright” in which the first hit is a book from 1912, and a search for “Copyright Law” that does not pull up the most recent and relevant books. This suggests that despite Kelly’s claims, users would still be better off if they consulted with a librarian. He also searched for some famous literary quotes (”it was the best of times”) that did not turn up their sources, but he did admit that at least one search (”Karl Rove”) turned up two good books at the top of the list and that led Vaidyanathan to information that he previously did not know.

Vaidhyanathan then reeled off 5 questions each for Google and the Google Library Partners:

For Google:
1. What will be the guiding principles for inclusion, exclusion, and rank within the index?
2. What will be scanned first? What order?
3. What safeguards are you taking to ensure user confidentiality and privacy?
4. What will be your metadata standards? Why would one book outrank another?
5. Will you omit certain titles from the index if a government demands it? Or will you merely present snippets to indicate the book’s existence?

For Libraries:
1. Did you insist on assurances that Google would protect user confidentiality and privacy?
2. Did you insist that Google’s index include input from your librarians about quality control, order of inclusion, order and metadata standards?
3. Did Google restrict your use of the digital files in any way? (no obvious restrictions in Michigan contract.)
4. Did you consider the harm to potential markets for publishers who have been selling and leasing digital files? What is the copyright justification for receiving an electronic copy as payment for a transaction?
5. What’s the hurry?

At one point, Vaidhyanathan compared Google Book Search to the Human Genome Project. Here, he claimed, a for-profit company named Celera demonstrated it could do the work better and faster, but governments declined, recognizing that this information should not be privatized. Now Vaidhyanathan became animated, stating that it should be the same for knowledge and asking, “since when is expediency one of the core values of librarianship?” (Ouch. I was taken aback when he said this.) He basically accused some of the world’s top research libraries of rushing into deals with Google in which they did not realize the true value of their holdings, failing to insist on quality control, failing to guarantee user privacy, and damaging their relationships with publishers.

These are serious charges, some of them have surfaced in a previous ACRLog post. As for the Google Library Partners side of the story, their public statements do point to the public good as a motivation for making their collections more widely accessible, and it’s hard to fault them for that. Vaidhyanathan’s comparison to the Human Genome Project seems unfair–no governments were willing to step up to digitize books on anything like the scale of Google Book Search as far as I know. According to the University of Michigan, it would have taken them more than a thousand years to digitize their collection on their previous pace of digitizing. New York Public Library strikes a cautious tone in their statement and hardly seems to be rushing into anything. As for quality control and metadata issues, I don’t know, but the FRBR Blog has reported that a Library of Congress working group on bibliographic control has recently met with Google. It’s an interesting point about library’s relationship with publishers–however there is an argument that GBS will help publishers to sell more books from their back catalogs.

But what about privacy? What were the discussions between the Library Partners and Google on privacy? Vaidhyanathan reminds us that Google is not just any company, but a humongous company with ambitious aims “to organize the world’s information.” Do we want all our information needs to be met and filtered through a lens that utimately has profit as its main aim?

In other interesting thoughts that Vaidhyanathan did not fully expand upon, he said he thought the issue of the libraries receiving an electronic copy as payment for the transaction could be the silver bullet that would lose a court case for Google. I think he also said that that if the project succeeds it will ultimately weaken fair use.

I don’t remember one session at ACRL Baltimore on Google Book Search. If Vaidhyanathan tells us one thing, it’s that as a profession, we need to know more.

UPDATE – A writer at the American Historical Association blog confirms some of Siva’s worries.