I’m not skeptical about Google and the loading of texts onto the Internet. See Guardian’s “Top libraries to go online . . .”. This isn’t exactly news. It may be a good thing. But how the search and retrieval will take shape over the next decade is going to test the idea of “digital books.”
We can always OCR paper-form texts into digital form, but what is the workable model: “image” as in Bodleian or Perseus hypertext? I’m always a little tickled by the almost unreadable static scanned pdfs of pre-1990 articles on databases.
Something to look forward to: interesting maps.
I am excited that research information from top libraries will now be online! Can you imagine searching through the files of Oxford University without ever setting foot in merry ol’ England? Yeah!!!
This may be shaky at first..but at least we are moving in the right direction. Besides, I don’t think it is going to be available right away. Such is life.