{"id":2571,"date":"2009-08-19T19:18:35","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T00:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=2571"},"modified":"2009-08-20T23:21:53","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T04:21:53","slug":"google-book-search-settlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=2571","title":{"rendered":"Google Book Search Settlement"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Google Book Search Settlement<\/a>, if approved by Judge Chin, may be a turning point in textual research. In principle, if the settlement goes through, then Google will release the full 7-10 million books for research (“non-consumptive”) use. Should get even the 500,000 public domain books for research we will have a historic corpus far larger than anything else. To quote the Greg Crane D-Lib article, “What can you do with a million books?” and “What effect will millions of books have on the textual disciplines?”<\/p>\n

There is understandably a lot of concerns<\/a> about the settlement especially about the ownership of orphan works. The American Library Association has a web site on the settlement<\/a>, as do others. I think we need to also start talking about how to develop a research infrastructure to allow the millions of books to be used effectively. What would it look like? What could we do? Some ideas:<\/p>\n