Stanford is one of the universities collaborating with Google on the
ambitious plan to digitize large numbers of books from the university's libraries. But little has been said yet how this digitized material will be used. The Stanford Daily
reports that members of Stanford faculty are not sure about this either and that they disagree to some extent.
Proponent of the project have always argued that the project will provide well-indexed digital books for researchers and "mitigate the need to move books off campus". Neither claim is undisputed, though.
Quote:
Some faculty members, however, worry that the digitization of books may lead to even more texts being removed from campus. History Prof. Philippe Buc argued that reading and assimilating the content in books on a computer screen is significantly different from having the book physically present. He cited the difficulty of annotating texts on the screen, which he felt was key to reflection on contents and preparation for discussion. ...
Buc admitted that digitization could have some benefits, but stood by his support for hard copies of texts.
“Digitization should be a servant of traditional scholarship, not a goal in itself,” he said. “We can be intelligent about this, but we cannot be mindlessly utopian. One thing I would advocate is a new undergraduate and graduate library containing the best books for teaching and paper research, on the model of Yale’s new Cross-Campus library. We would just need to duplicate Yale’s shelf-list and add in the areas we teach in that Yale does not teach in.”
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I admit, when it comes to research, I am still a paper magnet. Nothing is more satisfying than going through a stack of books and flipping through pages to find relevant information. Others may disagree, but I hope that Google Books and all other related projects will never lead to a decrease in available paper books in libraries.