Back to PLA, then, for one last note of the goings-on at this excellent meeting. The Dewey-blog contingent decided that, since we'd spent much of the week learning about what the big names are up to, what we really needed was a sense of how the smaller, independent, unsung heroes of Libraryland are coping with everything the 21st century is throwing at them. So we thought we'd check out what Google, Inc., a lesser-known Mountain View, CA, company is doing in the name of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. Which is quite a lot, as it happens. Actually, that bit about "organizing the world's information [etc.]"? Turns out that's Google's mission, and we know that for sure because Ben Bunnell told us 142 times in his talk on Thursday. Ben captured all our hearts with his bright-'n'-breezy overview of Google Book Search (whereby Google aims to index "every word in every book") and Google Scholar (ditto for scholarly journal articles); and then, on Friday, David Ferriero (director of research libraries at New York Public Library) brought us up-to-date with a chronological account of the challenges Google and its five partner libraries continue to face in providing access, through Book Search, to the copyrighted works held by those libraries. Both speakers gave shout-outs to OCLC's collection analysis of the "Google Five" (NYPL and the university libraries of Harvard, Michigan, Oxford, and Stanford), which found that 60% of all the works that the libraries collectively hold are represented in only one of the five. Many of the records that you'll retrieve when you use Book Search come complete with a "Find in a Library" link to OCLC's Open WorldCat, which lets you determine whether books are available in your local library; Google's intention is to extend this feature to more records in the near future. Now: Wouldn't it be cool if Book Search grouped subsets of search results into subject categories, so that users could browse classes of related material? Oh, but I guess that would require the books already to have been assigned class numbers or something. Hmm. Hang on a minute ...
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