Jake in a separate email I just put you in touch with Robert McDonald from the HathiTrust research center who may be able to carry the conversation forward.
And I’d be remiss in not mentioning that libraries hold these books, and you too can see the books – if not online than in person. You can start by looking in
WorldCat to see if the book is widely held. Many public libraries will do an interlibrary loan request for you – so you can get the book. You could even ask the library if it’s possible for them to acquire the book. Libraries are allied with Wikipedia – we
want to make closed resources open and that’s why libraries have books – so that YOU can get them when you need them.
Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research
From: wikipedia-library-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-library-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Alex Stinson
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 9:48 AM
To: Mailing list for the Wikipedia Library project
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia Library] Google Books
Hi Anders and Jake,
I was in a conversation with someone recently, who recommended that we talk to Haithi Trust about using their platform (because they have a little more leeway on how they give permission to use of their digital items). I am wondering who
we should be reaching out to in their community (or if we should shoot for institutional partnership through one of the university partners http://www.hathitrust.org/community). I haven't followed up on it,
because I didn't have a concrete proposal in mind: but its definitely something to look into during the next few months (something along the lines of Wikipedia Visiting Scholars).
It looks like their standard partnership aggreement requires institutional sign in via Shibboleth (http://www.hathitrust.org/eligibility_agreements) which is a feature that
we have talked about a little, but haven't made progress on actualizing it.
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:41 AM, Jake Orlowitz <jorlowitz@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Anders,
Thanks for you suggestion. I can assure you that [increased] Google Books access has been our dream from the start. It's very complicated because of the contentious legal situation that surrounded the massive scanning and limited sharing Google has been doing.
Because of that, we haven't prioritized increased access, however we haven't given up on the possibility of it one day happening. One thing that would be helpful is a personal contact with someone at Google who works on the Books program. If you know of
any Google-connected Wikipedians, please put us in touch.
Lead, The Wikipedia Library
Hi,
I have a little idea that could be really helpful for Wikipedians if it could be implemented. Google has
scanned in a vast collection of books. Some of these scanned pages can be read online via Google Books, and serves an important resource for Wikipedians confirming the verifiability of
text added to Wikipedia. However, many of the scanned pages can not be read: in some cases only an arbitrary selection of pages in a given book can be read, which may not be the ones need; in other cases, pages can not be read at all or they can only
be searched in the severely limited "Snippet View".
Now, there are good reasons why this is the case. The books copyrighted, and the rightsholders do not want to give their most important goods away for free to anyone on the internet. However, given Google's support for Wikipedia, and for
the open dissemination of knowledge, could Wikipedia Library perhaps approach Google and request a much more limited arrangement, like the ones it has with various journals?
Full access to all books in the Google Books Library Project would be utopic. But even a limited deal where a short range of pages can be requested for each book would be extremely helpful, because page numbers are specified countless references
on Wikipedia via the {{cite book}} template - we just do not have a way to easily get those pages. Yet.
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