Mike Furlough (HathiTrust) has published a storify with his commentary on two recent articles on Google Books, Scott Rosenberg’s “How Google Book Search Got Lost” in Backchannel and James Somers’s “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria” in The Atlantic. Furlough challenges the articles’ implication that Google Books is a failed project.
But we’re still at it. The Google Books Project has absolutely changed the world. Period. It may not do everything we hoped for. /18
— Mike Furlough (@MikeFurlough) April 13, 2017
Embedded in the response is a brief history of HathiTrust and its work with libraries to build a collection that is much more ambitious that that Google envisioned.
HathiTrust has always been focused on enabling large-scale collective action by libraries, not just creating a large digital library. /7
— Mike Furlough (@MikeFurlough) April 13, 2017
Preservation is the core of what HathiTrust does. But, long-term preservation *with* access. /8
— Mike Furlough (@MikeFurlough) April 13, 2017
Building upon that core mission of preservation, we have developed services possible only when you aggregate collections at this scale. /9
— Mike Furlough (@MikeFurlough) April 13, 2017
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through cooperation among Kelsey George, Joseph Koivisto, Stephen Lingrell, Stephen McLaughlin, Megan Martinsen, Allison Ringness, and Chella Vaidyanathan (Editors-at-large for the week), Patrick Williams (Editor for the week), and Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Caro Pinto and Roxanne Shirazi (dh+lib Review Editors).