Coming to you (almost live) from today's UC Berkeley School of Information conference on "The Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access."

Researchers shouldn't jump at the Google Books Settlement, just because it offers unprecedented access to a vast trove of books, Peter Brantley, director of access of the Internet Archive and organizer of a coalition that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon to share resources to oppose the settlement.

Scholars are interested in the millions of books Google scanned as part of its Library Project—and that are at the center of the class action—because they constitute "raw data" scholars and others can use for research purposes, like developing new disambiguation algorithms that can be used to definitively determine that one John Smith is different from another. The algorithms could then be either used for new research or turned into commercial products.

"This represents a huge opportunity," Brantley said. "We're on the threshold of a new vision of how books might be used... We're moving from where books are just books to where books are data."

But, he said, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Google Books Settlement itself is the right vehicle for making that vision a reality.

The books, scanned from dozens of libraries around the world, constitutes "a comprehensive selection of 20th century literature," Brantley said. "There's value in this comprehensiveness that we need to think about [and we need to think about] whether [we] want to entrust a single comprehensive collection to a single corporate actor."

"We don't have to grab the cookie that's offered to us before dinner," he said. "We can think about other ways of achievingthis goal."

Photo credit: prettytypewriters