Search engine giant Google made headlines in December when it announced it would form a partnership with four universities, including Harvard University, and the New York City Public Library to digitize substantial portions of their book collections.
The announcement was a signal that a growing number of libraries, including Brown's, are looking past the bookshelves and reference desk and into cyberspace.
"There's a lot of digital technology changing how libraries work," said Paul Jones, clinical associate professor at the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of the biggest changes is how people search for books and references, he added.
Google's beta digitization project will begin with Harvard, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Oxford University and the NYPL. The company plans to digitize the libraries of the five institutions and make them searchable through its own database. Only Stanford and Michigan are contributing their entire libraries.
Jean Rainwater, leader of the Web services department at Brown University Library, attended a librarians' conference in which Google presented its plan. She said it's unclear precisely what role Google will play.
"The libraries are still digitizing according to the standards they set," Rainwater said. "Google was helping it go faster." She speculated Google would help the digitization process financially. Several newspapers reported Google will contribute book scanning technology.
Jones said the Google partnership would transform the way people search for references.
"Having references instantly at your fingertips for everyone is the big thing," Jones said. "No matter how niche-y and obscure your search is, the materials will be there."
Rainwater said that while Brown's library is not included in the Google project, it could be in the future. If the beta project succeeds and other libraries were invited to join, Brown "would certainly be interested," she said.
The term "digital library" is still being defined, Jones said.
Rainwater said that in the case of Brown's digital libraries, books and manuscripts are scanned and the exact images of each page are put into the database. The texts are also run through an optical character recognition program so that users can run searches through the texts.
Formed in 2001, Brown University Library's Center for Digital Initiatives is in charge of digitizing Brown's library. Its digital library consists of rare collections, including African-American sheet music from 1820 to 1920, Napoleonic satires and "Perry Visits Japan: A Visual History," among other collections.
"What we're focusing now on is our more unique materials," Rainwater said. "There's no point in digitizing a trade book that is held in 300 different libraries."
But optimists who envision huge digital libraries with copies of every single published work will have to wait. There are restrictions to what can be put into a digital library, Rainwater said.
Copyrighted books cannot be digitized without permission, although clips from them often appear in digital libraries. Books published before 1923 are considered to be in the public domain and can be therefore digitized, but beyond that, Rainwater said, "there are a limited amount of things you can do."
On a broader scale, digital libraries may revolutionize conventional libraries.
"They would replace some functions that librarians do," Jones said. For example, "the reference desk may not be the same as before," he said.
Both Jones and Rainwater said conventional libraries will still serve their purposes, especially as quiet, comfortable places to study.
"Less and less may come to the library to find information, but people will still come for unique materials and other purposes, such as studying," Rainwater said.
