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Has anyone passed along these concerns to Google? I believe that Google wants to produce a high-quality product. I doubt if Google would ignore the concerns of the historical/archival community. Vicky Harden ************ Victoria A. Harden, Ph.D. Special Volunteer Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum victoria.harden@nih.gov -----Original Message----- From: H-Net/NCPH Discussion List on Public History [mailto:H-PUBLIC@H-NET.MSU.EDU] On Behalf Of Cathy Stanton/H-Public editor Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 9:01 PM To: H-PUBLIC@H-NET.MSU.EDU Subject: Re: Review of Googlebooks Thanks for sharing this. I agree whole-heartedly about the unfortunate haste to digitize on the part of many repositories. I was a consultant to one historical society that had received a grant for digitization. The set-up, staff hiring, and the learning curve were rather lengthy, and the organization became so anxious to give the donor a report of all the wonderful things being scanned that they practically threw documents into the hopper without the advance prep that I had counseled. For example, one set of important minutes, unpaginated, fell on the floor and the pages were mixed up. The director had the scanning tech scan it as it was, the technician said, because the scanner would sort it all out for them. Once scanned, the pages were impossible to rearrange in the database so the minutes made no sense. They wasted staff time, my time, and ended up with garbage. Another organization, not a client but one to whom I offered some friendly advice, decided to go ahead with scanning books by the thousands despite the fact that there was no plan or budget for refreshing the digital archive and upgrading it to new software standards on any regular basis. I believe that this sort of lack of forethought is quite common -- I've seen it a lot with government records. A digitization project takes a lot of organizational discipline; otherwise, the money would be better spent on traditional library or archival activities. Llyn Kaimowitz kaimo@comcast.net
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