National Library of the Netherlands reveals agreement with Google on digitization of books

Last year, the National Library of the Netherlands (‘the library’) signed a contract with Google to digitize 160,000 books in order to preserve cultural heritage. The contract was kept secret by the library until now, but is now published by the Dutch website Webwereld and the library. There is some criticism on the contract and also on the digitization of books in general. The main reasons thereof are the strict conditions of Google and the lack of quality of the digital books. However, the library seems to disagree on both points and states the contract is fine as well as the quality of the books.

The contract states the library is required to use technical measures to address the risk of piracy: widespread and systematic copying and downloading of books and indexing of pages. Therefore, the library is required to set up a security system to prevent users of digital books to distribute or use these books for commercial purposes (paragraph 4.7). Critics warn this would be difficult to put into practice. Furthermore, the library agreed to use a hyperlink to refer to the digitized books in Google Books and it will not use its own website just yet to offer the books.

Interestingly, the quality of the digital books is disputed. Many scholars say the digital books in Google Books would be useless for scientists. The Optimal Character Recognition (OCR) is working poorly and thus text mining would be labor intensive. Also finding specific books from a certain time period would be difficult and some pages would be hard to read because of hand or fingerprints of employees.  The National Library, however, guarantees that the books are easy to read and that another party always can rescan them. The latter is possible, because the contract is not exclusive, so anyone can scan books.

You can read the contract here.

Reference: Webwereld.nl