The recent issues of the New York Review of Books and College & Research Libraries each contain articles about Google and its impact on the library and research world.
Stanford's University Librarian, Michael Keller, has penned a guest editorial in C&RL entitled "Mountain View: the Agreement among Google, Publishers, and Authors." In this piece, he gives an overview of last autumn's settlement between Google and the publishers, and discusses its implications for libraries and researchers.
Harvard's Director of the University Library, historian Robert Darnton, has a piece in the NYRB entitled "Google and the Future of Books" This article puts the Google Book Search into the historical context of the Republic of Letters, and offers some of the advantages and weaknesses of the copyright settlement and of Google Book Search for users, authors, and libraries.
Both articles are well worth a look - and both conclude that libraries remain viable and important institutions that provide much more than digital access to information.
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