18 January 2009
Dear Everybody,
Coming from the academic side of things,
I'm concerned about permanent access
to YouTube resources.
I haven't heard any commitment from
the YouTube folks re either permanent
access and/or migration to new technology
when the next level/type of technology
appears ... as it surely will.
Four years down the road when my
Political Science students are looking
at the 2012 election and want to
examine YouTube and its role in the
2008 U.S. election, how many of
those YouTube resources will still
be there?
I have the same concern about Google Books.
I was in a meeting the other day and
the discussion was about the technical
aspects of putting Google Books & Google
Journals into our catalogue, connecting
them to our article linking service, etc.
I said that to my mind the question was not
if we could do this, but should we do this?
I'm a Government Documents librarian &
I was at a meeting a few years back with
the then U.S. Superintendent of Documents.
Google had recently announced its
digitization project (which includes
older U.S. Government Documents). GPO
(the U.S. Government Printing Office)
was also organizing a digitization
project of older documents at more or
less the same time.
Digitization is not cheap and GPO &
Google met to see if they could work
together, reduce individual expenses, etc.
The Superintendent of Documents told us that
Google would not agree to meet the GPO's
digitization standards, nor would they
commit to migrating their digitized
material to the next level/s of
technology.
GPO walked away from the possible deal
and if it had been my decision to make,
I would have too.
Kind regards,
Grace-Ellen
Professor Grace-Ellen McCrann
Chief, Government Documents Division
The City College of New York
Cohen Library, 2nd floor
160 Convent Avenue
New York, Ny 10031
(212) 650 5073
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