College library rankings

hawkette
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:41:59 +0000

I want to reinforce Alex’s comment on what is going on with the library scanning at U Michigan. Other prominent libraries that are also participating include the New York Public Library system, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. While there are other institutions that are balking at the potential for-profit approach involving Google, the end result is still ultimately going to be the same-vast quantities of library materials from many of the world’s top educational institutions will be put on the web for any and all to see and use.

IMO, this scanning project of library materials onto Google is a complete game-changing event that makes the university library less and less of a competitive advantage for any school. Granted, this project will likely take decades to complete, but it is not hard to envision a library as a unitary worldwide web resource that will be as available in Lubbock, Texas as in Cambridge, Mass or Cambridge, England or anywhere.