I have encountered a few interesting items relating to online, full-text books during the past few days, and thought they would make a good snapshot of where things stand at this time:

• Google Book Search : the Good, the Bad & the Ugly is an article in the current issue of Campus Technology which gives a great, non-technical overview of what the project is doing, and where it might be going. (found via LISNews )
• Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale (Pdf) is the text of Luc Vincent’s keynote at the ICDAR 2007 conference. Don’t read it simply because he heads Googles Optical Character Recognition (OCR) team – read it because it is fascinating and informative! (posted to NGC4lib by Owen Stephens)
• Finally, there is The Top Inventions of 2008 by Michael Hart (inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg). This isn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill predictions article. This looks at technology that is just around the corner (USB 3.0, Flash memory capacity, and the number of OCR scanned books) and realizes that we will soon be able to carry around more full-text books on a USB flash drive than exist in most libraries. Think about how that possibility will change our profession. (found via Open Access News )

Take the large number of people who work on Wikipedia and have them evaluate web pages, and what do you get? Wikisauri, a search engine from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.

The concept will be that the searches that Google et al. don’t do very well (a large number of sites that cannot be easily differentiated by a computer algorithm) will be evaluated by people, allowing for more accurate and relevant results.

Time will tell, as this is not the first time Wales has attempted to create a search engine.

from Open Access News

(12/24/06: TechCrunch has a screenshot)

The Wall Street Journal set up an interesting and extremely enlightening e-mail debate between Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Britannica.

I expected a polite statement of principles and strengths, and an establishment of the differences between the two encyclopedias, but a semi-playful banter develops, suggesting more tension than one might expect.  Or perhaps not, as people seem to choose a side in this debate and defend it strongly.

I use the Wikipedia a lot more than Britannica, mainly because I don’t own a set of the latter, and a high speed internet connection makes use of the former quite easy.  I consider the Wikipedia to be a research definer:  a tool to help one establish exactly what information one needs to search for.  If you don’t know what you need to find, it becomes harder to know where to find it.

I think this is an Apples and Oranges thing:  I wouldn’t recommend making an apple pie using oranges, nor using apple juice in a Screwdriver.

from ResourceShelf