The rise of the Internet has perhaps most profoundly
affected university libraries. Today, significantly more academic
journals and books are available over the Internet than
are found in any one university library. Google Books, for example,
has scanned some 20 million volumes, establishing a collection
that now approximates the size of the US Library of
Congress, the world’s largest library (Howard 2012). Much
of this content comes directly from collections at Harvard,
Stanford, and Oxford, which comprise some of the largest
university library systems in the world. Putting it most starkly,
consider this: if you were creating a university from scratch,
would you choose to invest as much in a library system as
today’s universities have historically done? And would you
choose to spend additional money on library buildings, heating
and cooling systems, and inventory and access control services,
just to maintain a collection that everyone else in the
world already has free access to online?
Well, of course you wouldn't, would you? And that's probably why nobody does.
Google has actually scanned more than 30 million books (as of April 2013). But the reality is that maybe a tenth of them (ie. 3 million) are freely available online. The rest are under copyright, so although you can search them, you can't get at them for free. And the same goes for other sources of free content like Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive (who, by the way, have over twice as many free books as either Google or Hathi Trust).
Don't get me wrong. Three million books is a lot, and it's great to have them available. It's just that most of them are pretty old. Unless your scholars and researchers aren't very interested in anything that happened after 1927 or thereabouts, they continue to have two options when it comes to the current literature. They can either:
- Buy everything they need themselves (which is what Google Books is angling for), or
- Pool their resources and pay for it collectively, so it can be shared with every member of their community.
Option #2, by the way, has historically been known as "the Library," and it's still remarkably viable.
But what about Open Access, you might well ask? Surely that will make the current literature free as well? That veers off a bit from the argument I'm addressing here (it's not mentioned by the authors of "The Troubled Future ...") so I'll just note that, again, it does help, but there is still a lot of information that our researchers and students legitimately need that is behind a paywall, or only available in dead tree format. And Open Access content is not really free: someone still has to pay to put it online, and even more of a challenge, ensure that it is preserved for the long term.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that developments like free access to public domain literature aren't transformative. But the nature of the transformation is evolutionary, and the notion that such access provides a viable replacement for what libraries do is a category error. Libraries are about collective ownership and stewardship of information resources. Google Books is not.
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Update 2014-09-18: Even the CBC is getting into the act, apparently:
http://www.cbc.ca/checkup/episode/2014/09/28/whats-the-future-of-the-library-in-the-age-of-google/.
Should be an interesting discussion.