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OCLC Vice President, Research and Chief Strategist Lorcan Dempsey, along with OCLC researchers Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Brian Lavoie have loooked at the Google Print project in the latest issue of D-Lib magazine here. They were able to provide preliminary estimates of what parts of the initial five collections were unique and where they overlap. Collections at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library were reviewed using WorldCat.
In the latest OCLC newsletter there some cool summaries of the Google Print Library Project (GPLP) results such as:
“The proportion of the system-wide collection covered by GPLP, once duplicate holdings across the five institutions are removed, is about 33 percent, or 10.5 million unique books out of the 32 million in the system-wide collection.
The pattern of cross-collection overlap implies that if each collection were fully digitized, about four out of every ten books would be re-digitized at least once, or in other words, the GPLP project reflects a minimum redundancy rate of about 40 percent.
Only 3 percent of the books in the 10.5 million GPLP collection are held by all five libraries.
More than 80 percent of the materials in the Google 5 collections are still in copyright.
The resource created by the GPLP may be far more culturally diverse than originally anticipated, given the fact that more than 430 languages were identified and that English language materials are slightly less than half of the books in the Google 5 combined collection.”
Of course, by now you’re already aware of the Author’s Guild class action lawsuit against Google to stop them from digitizing works still in copyright. At this point they have acknowledged that they can’t find proof that Google has done this yet.
Obviously this suit will have far reaching implications for the library world just as the Tasini case before it. We’ll need to watch it closely.
Now, it would be interesting to use the Library Normative Data project and see the unique circulations and overlap in library use beyond just static collections. I am intrigued.
Stephen

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Posted on: September 21, 2005, 2:14 pm Category: Uncategorized

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