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Guest Editorial 

Mountain View: the Agreement 
among Google, Publishers, and 
Authors 

The Google Book Search se lement has 
now been visible to the world since the 
end of October 2008, and significant 
commentary and criticism are beginning 
to appear. Some of that commentary is 
exceptionally well informed, as exem-
plified by Jonathan Band’s recent piece 
(http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/google-
se lement-13nov08.pdf), which exposes 
clearly the mechanics and financial details 
of the agreement. The time is therefore 
ripe for us to consider the implications 
of the se lement for the higher educa-
tion and public library communities and 
to ensure that our voices figure in to the 
public discourse as this landmark se le-
ment makes its way through the courts. 
Let me initiate that discourse by citing 
what I see as the most significant aspects 
of the se lement not just from a research 
library perspective, but as well bearing 
the a itude that all libraries are research 
libraries to some considerable extent. 

The overarching advantage of this 
se lement is that it allows us to dramati-
cally improve the accessibility of a large 
portion of the intellectual content that 
a few research libraries have carefully 
selected, acquired, cataloged, interpreted, 
and preserved in our physical facilities 
for so many years. Already the number 
of volumes that will be made accessible 
once the Settlement Agreement is ap-
proved amounts to over seven million. 
This is a larger collection than all but a 
very few of the largest libraries in the 

U.S. and for that ma er the world. Some 
portion of that seven million volume col-
lection consists of public domain works, 
and the remainder are in-copyright, but 
out-of -print books, ones published in 
the U.S. and in many other countries. 
Many languages and many countries of 
origin are represented in this new digital 
collection. 

The expansion of effective access to 
these digital books is unprecedented 
for those making use of the free licenses 
Google will provide to public libraries 
and to higher education institutions 
as well as for those subscribing to the 
institutional licenses and to individual 
readers paying for reading individual 
books. This expanded access will have 
incalculable beneficial effects on teaching, 
learning, and research in a great many 
se ings. This new and improved access 
will be empowering for individuals, 
self-paced learners, for school kids and 
their teachers, and for retirees. And this 
access should a ract many more patrons 
to public libraries, maybe turning the new 
readers into constant patrons. 

The full-text search that Google will 
provide for these works, as well as other 
advanced search tools that Stanford and 
other libraries are developing for use with 
full text, represent a dramatic improve-
ment over the traditional library catalog, 
and are well suited to the searching styles 
of current researchers. Key word index-
ing and searching effectively unlocks the 

Licensed under a Creative Commons license (h p://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/) from 
Michael A. Keller, University Librarian, at Stanford University. 

5 

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/google


     
        

    

     
      

      
        

     

 
    

    

      
       

      

 

     
     

      
       

 
        
       

      
 

     

    

 

 

6 College & Research Libraries 

contents of books, increasing the chances 
of discovery and certainly increasing the 
intellectual returns on the investments we 
in libraries have made in the names of our 
communities in collecting and preserving 
these books over many decades.  

Granted, there are restrictions. We 
cannot use the materials in every way 
we might imagine, or even every way 
we might have planned. It is not yet 
clear whether and how printing and 
downloading will work in practical and 
financial terms. Nevertheless, the se le-
ment provides a huge step forward for 
access to out-of-print and public domain 
works, which before the effective date of 
the Se lement Agreement were confined 
to our shelves.  

A particular example of improving 
access is the ability to link to e-books at 
Google from our catalogs to allow users 
to view title pages, tables of contents and 
indexes of books that appear in search 
results. O en, this is all readers need 
to determine if a book is of interest. The 
ability to review that material online, even 
when the readers want to read books in 
hard copy, saves a significant amount of 
time and effort. Stanford and others are 
already engaged in linking bibliographic 

January 2009 

records in catalogs to Google e-books. 
The se lement also adds another layer 

to the preservation schemes of participat-
ing libraries, as they will have digital 
scans of the books to use for preservation, 
among other things. Are these scans ev-
erything we would like them to be? Most 
certainly not. However, the scans will ex-
ist for a very large number of books, thus 
allowing us to take up digital preservation 
in a significant and thoughtful way. The 
Hathi Trust has already come forward 
as one model, Stanford is developing its 
own Stanford Digital Repository, and we 
anticipate other methodologies as we 
move forward. 

Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrim-
age writes: 

He who ascends to mountain-tops 
shall find 
The lo iest peaks most wrapt in 
clouds and snow 

Extensive library collections formerly 
accessible in a few, well-supported insti-
tutions were effectively “wrapt in clouds 
and snow”. Soon they will become ac-
cessible to multitudes of readers in many 
locations. 

Michael A. Keller 
Stanford University