GOOGLE BOOKS VS.BISON

摘要

Just as the Internet is likely to be one of the most disruptive overall technologies of our lifetimes, Google Books may become one of the most disruptive technologies for academic libraries. The immediate challenge is that Google Books' deeper indexing and more advanced relevancy ranking usually works better than that of our local catalogs-and it always returns results. With library catalogs, bigger is better, and one all-inclusive silo is preferable to lots of little ones. Unfortunately, university library catalogs of fewer than five million books are bound to have much overlap with the 80-100 million books that will appear in Google Books in a few years. The total number of books scanned so far is a closely held secret, but Google has claimed to be scanning 3000 items every day. The University of Michigan alone scanned its millionth book for the project back in February 2008.