Widespread Ignorance About Google B.S.

According to a story in this morning’s Chronicle, many scholars remain “wary” of the Google Book Search project. This is perhaps to be expected (many librarians are wary of it, too, although I prefer to think of our work more as “due diligence”), but more distressing is the conclusion drawn by Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley School of Information and Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology) that there is “widespread ignorance [among our colleagues] about the agreement and its implications for the future of scholarship and research.”

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!