WHO:Google Book Search

WHAT:Google Book Search Launches Scary Stories Site

WHERE:www.google.com/scarystories

WHEN: Starting October 25, 2006

WHY: What would Halloween be without a little trick-or-treating? This year, make exploring spooky classic tales part of your treat.

We’ve gathered some of the best scary classics you can find. This includes the familiar Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as more obscure tales like Thomas Hardy’s The Withered Arm or Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge. You’ll find 26 stories at google.com/scarystories.

Search the full text of the books to discover who famously uttered “nevermore,” why Van Helsing was forced to behead the “bloofer lady” and how Ichabod Crane met his untimely end in a tranquil glen called Sleepy Hollow.

Since we’ve digitized the full text of these stories and novels, you can search every word. But that’s not all, these books are part of the public domain in the U.S., so whenever you see a button, you’re free to download, save and print a PDF version to read at your own pace. And if you decide you want to buy a hard copy, “All editions” will show you multiple editions, many of which are available for purchase.

Please note that some of these books may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world. Where copyright status is in question, we do not enable Full View access or downloading.

We hope that Google Book Search helps you discover some great new authors — and maybe even sends a shiver or two down your spine.

For more information, please see today’s Google Blog post at http:/googleblog.blogspot.com or Google Book Search at http://booksearch.blogspot.com.

CONTACT:
Megan Lamb
703.926.5292

It fascinates me that this conversation keeps coming up. I know, it’s still relevant, but it seems like the messages that I heard in the portion of the debate I attended really seem to be the messages that I’ve heard over and over again since I was in library school 4 years ago.

Searching on the web sucks, as was mentioned in the session, and we all know it. Our patrons know it, too, but still they end up doing what they can with what they have, and really being OK with the first 10 search results they receive. Roy mentioned that Google will only outseat libraries if we let them, which I do believe is true, especially if we keep trying to compete in the same arena of search, instead of community. Points were made by Stephen Abram about how teaching boolean searching to patrons is really just silly, because they’ll never learn it, and that the new age of search is really about about solving problems in teams.

Roy relayed a story about how he explained the concept of WorldCat to an executive at Microsoft (I think, I could be wrong), and how the exec’s response was that it would be so awesome if WorldCat was just released to the internet wild, open source, with APIs that let people create applications that worked with and on top of it. Roy then said that he could imagine the people at OCLC freaking out (in a bad way) at the concept.

So what *if* we took WorldCat and made it *directly* open source? Why not create offer an API (Application Programming Interface) to allow poeple to create toys to make WorldCat work better and do interesting things for users? Why should we just be happy, as Stephen kinda put it, with WorldCat’s records being open in Yahoo? My response is that there’s a very defensive stance in the library world (especially with library vendors) about metadata, but it’s also, as Roy says, the issue of librarians not really being able to digest all the huge possibilities.

I live in a world where my friends share and keep up with friends’ lives on MySpace, LiveJournal, and Friendster, pictures are shared on Flickr, social plans happen through text messages and IM, on a daily basis. My friends are a hard-to-reach 21 – 40 with zero kids set in the library world, who use the same social networking applications as “millenials” (and play DDR and hang in Second Life and watch video on YouTube). We use open source applications, we happily play with the toys that come out of APIs for Flickr, Google, Yahoo!. And a good number of the people in that set live robust online lives, just like the millenials that Roy mentioned in his commentary.

Why this digression into my social set? Because the millenials aren’t the only group that exhibit these behaviors, and many of the people in my set are the new generation of *librarians* who are too often ignored. We see the value of these technologies and services, we want to integrate them into library services to adjust how we do things to reflect the affect online social networking is having on the offline, meatspace world. Not as a replacement, not as a way to unseat old-school librarians the way that people seem to think Google is trying to unseat libraries, but to find a way to take fun like tagging, social searching, and social bookmarking to serve a broader set of patrons.

So what’s my take? I agree with Roy, that Google and other search engines will only bump libraries if we let them. I agree with Stephen when he says we’re asking the wrong question, and we’re trying to compete in the wrong arena. We live in a world where information is power and yet omnipresent, and the ability to access that information is not the issue, so librarians just don’t own that market anymore. We need to stop clinging so tenaciously to the librarian-as-information-god-and-your-not defensive stance, and into a more open, community-oriented, socially-connected user experience stance.