Darnton on the Google settlement

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

Harvard professor and University librarian Robert Darnton has a 
long piece on the Google settlement in the next issue of the New 
York Review of Books:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281 
Close readers of earlier pieces by him will have predicted his 
judgment accurately:

"Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we 
now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by 
Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of 
research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could 
have done the job at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner 
that would have put the public interest first."

The "could" has to be parsed carefully there.  I had some reason 
to know the state of play around LC on these issues a decade ago, 
and the prospects for public funding in support of such a project 
were slim, to say the least.  I need to reread the piece, but it 
does seem to omit any expression of gratitude towards Google for 
having stepped in where the public sector did not act or for 
having fought through the tangles of copyright to get to the 
settlement.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.