There is a project on campus spanning over 100 countries and 35 languages, involving a partnership between UW-Madison and a leading Internet company, but most students on campus don't even know how it works.
As part of the Google Books Initiative, the UW-Madison Library System was the eighth library worldwide to join with the information powerhouse Google to bring books into the digital age, scanning them to be used online. The initiative, which now has over two dozen library partners and thousands of publisher and author partners, has a mission to ""create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers,"" according to their website.
The project at UW-Madison, which has also partnered with the Wisconsin Historical Society, has no direct costs, according to Edward Van Gemert, Deputy Director of the General Library System at UW-Madison.
""Google pays for the actual digitization,"" Irene Zimmerman, project manager for the Google Initiative, said, referring to the process of digitally scanning pages of books from the university's libraries to be placed in a database and online at books.google.com. The books are collected and shipped to an off-site location where Google does the actual scanning and digitization. Although Google pays for the process, Zimmerman said the university incurs costs ""on either end of gathering the material [and] reshelving the material.""
Thus, much of the cost is associated with staff wages.
According to Jeanne Witte, head of Access Services at Steenbock Memorial Library, the Google project has three full-time employees who are employed by the library system, with their total salary approximately $87,400 annually.
The initiative also calls on the support of library staff across campus.
""There are many librarians who work on the Google Project,"" Witte said. ""They do a lot of background work as far as cleaning up records and getting stuff ready to go.""
Because of the way the initiative has been integrated into the library system, many different people help with the gathering of books to be sent off-site for digitization.
""It was a lot of just pulling things from the shelves, doing a few things to the item records in our cataloguing system to send them out and then sending them out to Google to be digitized,"" said Phil Hansen, a former Google Books Initiative assistant. Hansen, who now works as the manager of the Middleton Shelving Facility, said the initiative ""open[s] a lot of doors for people who are doing research,"" but that the initiative could ""be tedious at times.""
""I think we've definitely created more work than we thought when we were there,"" Hansen said. ""In some places like Memorial [Library], they had to hire student employees just to get stuff barcoded because it was too much to ask [the Memorial Library] staff to do, essentially.""
This work overload was due in part to the large amount of books being processed to send out, as Hansen mentioned the process of pulling books off the shelves revealed damage, lack of barcodes and other overlooked problems. However, those were problems that would have needed to be addressed at some point and the standard staff was too busy to handle.
""We created a lot of work,"" Hansen said, ""but we also solved a lot of problems by being there.""
Because the initiative draws from many libraries on campus, not just Memorial Library, where the Google staff is located. As a result, other librarians have been handed an increased workload at times.
""It definitely increased the workload of a lot of the libraries from where we were sending,"" Hansen said.
Peter Gorman, head of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, which leads the university's own digitization efforts, saw a similar workload increase with library staff.
""It's an investment,"" Gorman said. ""The staff that we have is devoted to working on this project are devoted to providing access to information for our patrons … So what they're doing isn't a sidetrack from our mission; it's supporting our mission.""
Although the libraries send mainly books, rather than journals or magazines, Hansen said they also make a point of sending masters and doctoral theses to Google. At times, the theses were too large to meet size constraints that Google set, so they would have to be rebound into two smaller volumes, a process carried out on campus by the bindery located in Memorial Library.
""The bindery was definitely an area that got hit very hard by extra work because they were not prepared or staffed to handle the amount that we were putting at them because there were so many [theses] that were oversized,"" Hansen said. ""I know that their workload increased dramatically while we were dealing with the theses especially.""
According to Louise Coates, supervisor of the bindery in Memorial Library, the bindery also works with damaged books so that they are in good condition before being sent to Google.
""These volumes are routed to us to be rebound before being sent to Google so they are intact for processing at Google,"" Coates said in an e-mail. ""Rebinding of … theses for the Google Initiative has had an impact on our workload, but we have integrated it into our regular workflow.""
Copyright Concerns and Legal Disputes
From the beginning, a debate has surrounded the alliance between Google Books and UW-Madison. As the eighth library to team up with Google to digitize library materials, UW-Madison found itself at the initiative's infancy stages.
""Even back that time [when the agreement was signed in Oct. 2006], there was a lot of controversy around this agreement,"" Van Gemert said. ""The issue at that time was legal suits, by publishers and authors, against Google for digitizing in-copyright material.""
Even though Google wasn't showing the text for the in-copyright material, many authors and publishers were concerned that even a preservation copy was being digitized, Van Gemert said.
According to Shubha Ghosh, a professor at the UW Law School, Google is attempting to create digital uses for books that don't infringe on copyright law.
""The thing that makes it difficult is the fact that in order to get to those uses, they have to make a copy of the book, and copyright law seems to be pretty strict about that if you want to make a copy of the book—a reproduction of the book—you need to get permission from the copyright owner to do so,"" Ghosh said.
The controversy eventually went to court in a battle over fair use doctrine, a portion of copyright law that Anuj Desai, associate professor at the UW Law School, described as ""notoriously ambiguous.""
According to Gorman, the class action lawsuit against Google alleged that the actual act of scanning books was a violation of copyright.
""[Google's] defense in that was that the way that they were doing it constituted fair use, and copyright law has exemptions for fair use,"" Gorman said. ""We agree with Google's interpretation of that.""
Google attempted to settle the dispute out of court, according to Van Gemert, eventually reaching an agreement that Google Books' homepage calls ""groundbreaking.""
""About a year and a half ago, Google contacted us and said, ‘We would like to negotiate a settlement with those publishers and authors … not because we think they will win and we will lose, but because we think we can negotiate a settlement that would be better for everyone's access to stuff in the long run,'"" Van Gemert said.
The end result, although still needing final approval from the court, involves an ""institutional subscription,"" Van Gemert explained, which would open up all of the public domain material and ""the entire corpus, for material that's in copyright and out of print, and for material that's in copyright and in print,"" to institutions, like universities and libraries, who purchased a subscription.
Van Gemert also noted that each public and academic library in the United States would receive one copy of the entire project.
Still, the settlement comes with a dose of skepticism.
""There's a lot of controversy around [the new agreement],"" Van Gemert said. ""Some of the issues have to do with concern over a monopoly. Some of the issues still have to do with concerns over copyright. A large piece of the concern has to do with control.""
In many ways, the settlement aims to give back some of the control that publishers and authors believe was jeopardized by digitizing, according to Desai.
Van Gemert compared some of the copyright concerns to issues making the news recently in the music industry, and the lawsuits filed by the recording industry, as well as concerns decades ago with the use of microfilm, video recording and other means of preservation.
""At the heart of it, the issues concern lying and intellectual property, and that's always going to come up,"" Van Gemert said. ""There's no easy way around it.""
However, Desai noted that the way people consume books is different than the way people consume music.
""The one thing that may be true is that at least for many books, is that you only use them once,"" Desai said.
According to Ghosh, the ease of copying items on the Internet also can make copying easier to trace, and therefore monitor.
""If you do take the view of copyright law that it's the copyright owner's prerogative to determine when copies get made, then that becomes a very difficult … legal standard to apply when copying can be done very easily,"" Ghosh said. ""The copyright owner's view is that the ease of copying also makes it easier in some ways to meter the copying.""
And, unlike the music industry, Google is the major force in digitization, not a large number of smaller sources. Although some opponents fear a monopoly on the part of Google, Desai viewed having a single source for digitization as one of the project's strengths, and a major factor in maintaining copyright precedents.
""One big difference is that here all the digitization is being done by one company,"" Desai said. ""There isn't a realistic possibility of a competition to Google.""
Moving Forward
With the copyright concerns being handled for now, UW-Madison is still moving forward with the Google Initiative.
""It's been remarkably smooth, really at every level,"" Gorman said. ""In terms of the library's mission, this is a tremendous leap forward in providing access to information and to do it in a way that's more convenient than ever before.""
And just what is that mission? Although the UW library system works for the benefit of the students and faculty who keep this research giant running with new information, Gorman also sees a big-picture view of the initiative's benefits.
""Access, access, access,"" Gorman said. ""A library's mission is to provide access to information.""
Because of its partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, UW-Madison has been able to send many historical texts and non-circulating collections from its archives, including numerous texts that are used for genealogy research.
""We have Wisconsin citizens who can search what they want to search from the comfort of their own home,"" Zimmerman said. She also noted the American Indian Collection, which students K through 12 across the state use while on field trips, and which will now be available online.
According to Zimmerman and Van Gemert, the university also receives its own copy of all of the digitized materials, which is being added to a repository housed at the University of Michigan, where a number of Google partners are building a digital library.
Objections to Google Books' settlement are being collected until May 5, with a hearing scheduled for June 11.
