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."

Part of the reason it seems so difficult to nail down what Google's rights and responsibilities should be under its settlement with authors and publishers regarding the millions of books it scanned from university libraries is that the company seems slippery about what the real-world analogy is for what it's doing.

Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, made that point today:

I find the Google project to be one of the most remarkably chameleon affairs I've come across. Sometimes it seems to claim—or people claim for it—that it's a library. That brings with it a great deal of our warm feelings toward libraries. But when you look at it and say, "Will you behave [like a library]?", they suddenly say, "Well we're not really a library. You can't think we're a library." And then they become a commercial database. Or they become a bookstore. And that's their interest. Or they become some kind of general philanthropic trust concern, but then they'll move back from that again once more and become cold-headed business people....

I think there are times when we need to put Google's feet to the fire and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?"

For other coverage of today's conference, see: