Editorial

Citation

Chalcraft, T. (2007), "Editorial", Reference Reviews, Vol. 21 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2007.09921daa.001

Editorial

Google’s attempt to digitise every printed book published is apparently proceeding apace. A recent article in The New Yorker “Google’s moon shot” (Toobin, 2007) reported that tens of thousands of books are being trucked from the collaborating libraries each week for scanning. The book search site is up and running (http:/books.google.uk is the UK linked address) and must already include millions of titles. To measure progress I did a quick “advanced” search on Dorking, my home town (note to American readers – this is a well-heeled London commuter town, and has no connection to the US derogatory slang term), as a title word and retrieved 18 hits. Admittedly, a similar search on COPAC, the embryonic UK national union catalogue currently based on the holdings of major academic research libraries, dwarfed this with 712 records, but many of these were either for ephemera or duplicated titles. Even if Google has a long way to go the intention is clear – a digitised library of the world’s books, albeit with restricted access to in copyright items, is in the making.

In The New Yorker article there is speculation on the number of printed books available for digitisation. Apparently WorldCat now has 32 million monograph type records, but as every frequent user will know even this behemoth is incomplete, especially for specialist and non-mainstream monograph materials. According to company Vice-President Marissa Mayer, the best estimate of how long it will take Google to finish hoovering up all accessible books is “inside ten years”, with the final total scanned expected to easily exceed WorldCat’s monograph bibliographic records. To complicate matters, while Google is by the far most ambitious and industrious book digitiser, there are, as we all know, numerous other organizations and companies engaged in projects to put the page on screen. Most of these projects are subject specific with relatively constrained boundaries. Many are subscription or purchase products from commercial publishers (a good number of which have been reviewed in these columns) but others are free for all to access. Most notably, Yahoo and Microsoft have joined with several major libraries to form the Open Content Alliance, a major monograph digitisation initiative. This is the only site to seriously challenge Google Books. All-in-all of course, this means that there is bibliographical confusion brewing. Yes, book digitisation and a universal electronic library are within our grasp, but the end result could be a competing muddle, less well ordered or approachable for the causal user than the traditional shelf-bound library.

Google’s hegemonic and commercially driven drive to digitisation is in contrast to some of the publicly funded initiatives that have developed in a number of countries. In the UK the Joint Information System Committee (JISC) has been prominent in funding a number of programmes. As this issue went to press came news of the second phase of a major £12 million project to make digitally available 16 further collections (see further www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation_home.html). These include the First World War Poetry Archive at Oxford University, the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent, a further batch of archival sound recordings from the British Library, the UK Theses Digitisation Project, the British Newspapers 1620-1900 (British Library) project and Welsh Journals Online from the University of Wales.

In this issue of Reference Reviews we also feature a number of non-commercial digitisation projects. The newest of these, launched back in October, is the University of Cambridge’s The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online (RR 2007/179). Containing more than 50,000 pages of searchable text and 45,000 images of both publications and transcribed manuscripts, this will be the largest and richest repository of primary material on Darwin available to scholars. An older established digital resource is The Virtual Vietnam Archive (RR 2007/200). Currently running to 2.4 million pages and expected to grow to many times this number, this is a site with appeal to students and researchers, but also all those touched by the Vietnam conflict including veterans. A far smaller and specialised site is Antique Maps of Iceland (RR 2007/202) providing digital copies of maps of the country made up to around 1900. Along with Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project (RR 2007/190) and the Library of Congress American Memories Band Music of the Civil War (RR 2007/186), it sits at the other end of the digitisation spectrum – small scale projects making available niche resources that might otherwise gather dust accessible to only a very limited audience.

Another resource featured in this issue which at its core is effectively a digitisation of previously printed material is Gale’s Biography Resource Center (RR 2007/193). Containing information derived from a range of the company’s printed sets such as Contemporary Authors, this is one of a number of commercially available biographical blockbuster databases, distinguished from others featured recently in these columns such as World Biographical Information System (RR 2005/115) and H.W. Wilson’s Biography Index: Past & Present (RR 2007/104) by its predominantly full text content and other added materials. Also featured in these columns is a Gale heavyweight print set, The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine (RR 2007/182). Presented in five volumes and updated after just five years, this is one of the primary sources of medical reference information pitched at the general user and appears to be holding its own against the numerous medical sites that throng the internet.

As always, we endeavour to provide a range of important and interesting reviews and the above highlighted selection should not detract from reading of the rest. If any other reviews were to be singled out, these might be the Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work (RR 2007/167) from Greenwood Press (we commented in the previous issue on this publisher’s penchant for selecting novel topics for reference coverage when reviewing their efforts on hair and fast food), the latest part of the English language version of Brill’s New Pauly of the Ancient World now starting a run of Classical Tradition volumes (RR 2007/194) and the Yale Book of Quotations (RR 2007/163), surely one of the best general quotation dictionaries to appear in recent years. Regular and observant readers may also notice that after eight years we are no longer carrying an Internet editorial column. Its editor, Rónán O’Beirne, has moved to pastures new and we have decided that now the internet has become mainstream in reference and information work we would be better replacing the column with an alerting section that pinpoints new or revised electronic resources, many of which we will subsequently review in following issues.

Tony ChalcraftEditor Reference Reviews and University Librarian, York St John University, York, UK