Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Google's library plan has Achilles heel

December 16, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Google's library plan has Achilles heel

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Google's promise to digitize or scan in thousands of books from some of the major libraries in the world leaves me with one simple question.

Who's going to do the proofreading?

I realize there are high speed scanners available but I wonder how accurate they are?

If the average printed page has 550 words on it and a scanner is 99 percent accurate that means there would be 5.5 errors or misreads of letters and or words per page. That's a lot of errors to find.

Of course you could put it through a file matching program. But then, you'd have to scan in the text to match it against the scanned in text wouldn't you?

According to Reuters "Google's partners on the project, which is an expansion of its Google Print program that allows users to search inside books, are Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library."

I know from first hand experience scanning can be somewhat problematic. lower case h's and n's can look awfully similar to a non-human scanner.

Imagine a first time online reader of Hamlet puzzling over the line, "to be or hot to be"?

If you want to read about other issues being raised over Google's ambitious plans take a look at my colleague Jon Udell's blog Libraries and the Internet.

Udell also references Paul Kedrosky's blog which is worth reading.

Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on December 16, 2004 09:52 AM

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