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What else should be Googled?

25 comments on What else should be Googled?

What else should be Googled?

: Following Google’s wonderful announcement that it is scanning and making available to us all searchable text from thousands of books at top libraries, I wonder what else you think should be available? I’ll start the list:

: Transcripts and scripts of TV shows, movies, and radio shows — both news and entertainment.

: Periodical archives (at least in an Amazon model, which could drive sales).

: TV listings. OK, that sounds silly, but it is a chronicle of the culture.

What else?

: Just yesterday, as I walked by the New York Public Library, I saw school busses passing and the thought occurred that someday (soon), that building could be seen as either a museum or a public wi-fi hotspot instead of as a storage bin. And a few hours later, Google announced its library project.

25 responses to “What else should be Googled?”

  1. edith Avatar
    edith

    How about an open source/free software version of this so a big company like Google isn’t focused on making money or collecting my data while I search/browse? This should be a public good, not a private company making it “available” to the public.

  2. Keith Avatar
    Keith

    I think they should take some time and scan some older books – and I don’t just mean vintage. I mean OLD.
    To explain – a few years ago I had the pleasure of working on an absolutely spectacular Alternate History TV show that was set in and around the space race of the 60’s. (unfortunately the show was axed as we were working on the pilot – a causualty of the net bust due to its really innovative and integral net component.)
    We paid special attention to how we believed the year 2000 would look in the 1960’s. Reading the news of the day, the books speculating on the future of the Space Program and America and the Soviet Union were particularly interesting – humbling in a way and it makes me look at everything written and discussed today in a very interesting, very critical, very temporally expansive way.
    For anyone interested in this – WSJ put out a great compliation of editors and journalists thoughts on what the world would be like in the year 2000… in 1967 (I think), it’s worth the time to track down. Obviously, much of it is way off (but way off in such interesting ways) and some of it is pretty accurate.

  3. Amy Langfield Avatar
    Amy Langfield

    It’s already a wi-fi hotspot — both in the library and in the park out back. Details.

  4. Easycure Avatar
    Easycure

    How about publicizing FCC meeting transcripts to try and determine which FCC peeps are responsible for trampling on the 1st Amendment? Maybe there are people in there opposed to Powell’s idiotic views.

  5. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    Edith – check out Project Gutenberg

  6. Douglas Arellanes Avatar
    Douglas Arellanes

    Considering that many TV stations running on analog systems still do an awful lot of tape erasing – especially of local programming – maybe the shows themselves should be archived somewhere.
    Back in the dot-com days I read about a company that sought to provide a search engine for TV that used the closed-captioning to provide a searchable cue point for video. It was a great idea then, and probably still is now.

  7. Michael Zimmer Avatar
    Michael Zimmer

    Thinking more about Project Gutenberg (more here), I agree with Edith. It would be nice if the NSF or Ford Foundation or Gates Foundation would donate funds to further this non-corporate effort. Its great that Google is doing this (along with Google Scholar) but Google is not a philanthropic organization, and in the end, they might feel pressure to turn such services into profit centers, which maybe not always be in the public interest.

  8. Jazz Shaw Avatar
    Jazz Shaw

    Speeches and Press releases from state level politicos, not just Federal, from around the nation. It would be great to be able to go back and track down what these people were saying early in their careers once they are suddenly running for Senate or the White House.

  9. John Thacker Avatar
    John Thacker

    Easycure–
    No such luck, at least with the appointed Commissioners. You’ll note that each of the Commissioners on the FCC produces a statement with nearly every ruling. The Democrats (of which there are 2 on the 5 member Commission, both chosen by Democrats) are just as fierce (Capps even fiercer) when it comes to censorship. All these decisions we hate have come down 5-0, after all, with Capps even arguing for fines where Powell opposed them.
    The civil service workers are a little looser about it than the Commissioners, though.

  10. Ian Nowland Avatar
    Ian Nowland

    Google had announced a while ago that they would like to scan and index everything ever written. I seem to remember that they mentioned that at the current cost, scanning the entire Library of Congress would cost about 250 million. That’s surprisingly palatable, especially if taken in chunks.

  11. Malevoces Avatar
    Malevoces

    Edith,
    The creation and maintenance of this is *expensive and difficult* and will not be accomplished with platitudes and good intentions. The people at Google are hyper-focused on the delivery of content and value to their customers. They are providing *a* service not *the only* service. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If you don’t want someone “focused on making money” providing you with a service, sit home and *starve*. Food is certainly more of a “public good” than libraries, and it is delivered at a less than 2% overhead by people “focused on making money”. Profit and competition drive efficiency.
    How about we also create a government version “delivered as a public good” and set it up along side Google. It can have idiotic filters like the computers at the library and liberal and conservative groups can fight to censor “racist” and “sexual” content. It can be slow and ponderous as bureaucrats try to jam “features” that no one wants in to justify their own existence. It can be inaccurate as pressure groups “balance” search results to be “fair”. It can be expensive by not selling advertising, but “Foundations” will be able to buy pop-up ads. It can be unreliable, using “simple open source code” that is easy to implement except for 99.7% of the public who think the Kernel makes fried chicken. Finally, it can be finished in late 2012 and ready for initial use in 2015 after the Senate hearings.
    Frankly, I don’t care if we have a “public” version of this service, I just don’t want to pay for it. My paycheck is light enough already without funding another government “public works” disaster.
    Get a clue, “Public Good” = “Hopelessly Broken”

  12. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    I would love to see Google (or anyone else for that matter) take a role in music preservation very seriously. Not just the tunes, but the notes, the musicians, lyics, sheet music, who, what, when and why. If I’m wondering what the third track on New Model Army’s second album is, I have nowhere but eBay to try and find it.

  13. shell Avatar
    shell

    The next step: hyperlink everything.
    Right-click for definitions is starting to show up now, but I’d like to take it further. I was reading a Jane Austen novel recently and thought how nice it would be to have easy access to word definitions as they were used at the time, rather than how they are used now. Context would be nice too, such as the difference between the different types of carriages mentioned, which any of Austen’s original audience would have taken for granted. History texts should be hyperlinked to contemporary newspapers, diaries, radio broadcasts, etc. Footnotes should be hyperlinks, and scholarly papers (legal, scientific, or academic) should have the equivalent of “trackback” to link them to future papers where they appear in footnotes.
    The step after that would be one click translations of everything, but I don’t know how possible that is.

  14. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    Tveyes.com searches the closed-captioning of television shows for keywords. Maybe voice recognition someday will allow the search of radio broadcasts. Maybe we’ll someday record our sensory perceptions and be able to search our life’s experiences…

  15. Laurence Simon Avatar
    Laurence Simon

    The broadcast logs of every FCC-licensed radio and television station in the United States along with every component of their “public file.”

  16. Michael Zimmer Avatar
    Michael Zimmer

    question: why is the distribution of (book) knowledge via the Internet, via a linear & textual search engine interface, considered de facto a positive development?

  17. Mark Kawakami Avatar
    Mark Kawakami

    I would love to have museums Googled. It would be great to be able to Google “Contemporary Sculpture” and get not just some random pics and resources on the subject, but access to, say, fairly high quality reproductions of LACMA’s collection, along with whatever information the museum provides about each exhibit or piece. It’s sort of like the visual counterpart to the Library project.
    Also, Presidential libraries would make a nice addition to the library project.

  18. oodja Avatar
    oodja

    The BBC announced last year that they would be digitizing all of their content – radio, television, internet – retrospectively and making it available online in the public domain.
    And Project Perseus at Tufts provides texts of Latin and Greek authors that are completely “clickable” – each word a hyperlink taking you to a lexicon entry and an analysis of its morphology and frequency of use in ancient literature.
    As a librarian-in-training I think Google’s partnership with all of these major universities and their collections is a wonderful thing. But calling the NYPL a “storage bin”? Bite your tongue, Jeff Jarvis!

  19. dave pell Avatar
    dave pell

    I think a government org is already digitizing periodicals from the past.
    http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/business/technology/10198049.htm

  20. Cog Avatar
    Cog

    I want trackbacks on Blogger first.

  21. shell Avatar
    shell

    Michael Zimmer: Because books are heavy and bulky and vulnerable to fire, flood, mildew, and silverfish. Because computer searching is much more efficient than looking through every book to find something. Because of all the people in the world who don’t have access to a good library.

  22. Jazz Shaw Avatar
    Jazz Shaw

    You can have trackbacks on blogger. Just use Haloscan. You can see it in action on my blog and lots of others. I think Atrios uses it as well.

  23. Elrod Avatar
    Elrod

    How about things from public archives? The Mormon Family Research Institute (name?) does a yeoman’s job of transcribing tons of public archives records every year and then they sell them as CDs. The problems is, if you’re doing either genealogy or social history it’s very difficult to know exactly what CD has what you need. Not exactly an archival source but I just found that somebody transcribed the Lexington, Kentucky 1859 City Directory which I need for my dissertation. I couldn’t believe it was available on line and searchable when I was ready to travel God knows where to thumb through it, or maybe purchase the CD version for $30. If Google makes this stuff accessible for free then we all benefit.

  24. Kamal Avatar
    Kamal

    So Jeff Jarvis wants to see TV scripts on Google – it figures. Americans have been dumbed down and their attention spans demolished by too much TV. How about some books by the most eminent scholar of Iraqi Shi’ism, Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, the man Jeff calls “pond scum. Most of the Iraqis and other Arabs I’ve known for over forty years agree with Professor Cole. Jeff writes “ever since America engaged Iraq” – the word is ATTACKED, not “engaged” Jeff. What would we do without our euphemisms. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead! Most of the Iraqis I know, I met the first one back in 1960, hate Saddam, but didn’t want to be bombed or invaded by the U.S. If any Iraqi you may have met since our attack says he is in favor of what Bush has done, ask him how many family members he’s lost due to the U.S. invasion! None, most likely. I suspect Jeff also thinks Professor Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence is also pond scum. Don’t forget, Bush invaded Iraq to look for WMD that Saddam was supposed to be able to launch against us in 45 minutes; failing to find any, he came up with the liberating the Iraqis excuse. The U.S. has a long history of supporting dictators when it suited our purposes and many Iraqis are well aware of that. Maybe we could liberate the Tibetans, the Egyptians, the Burmese, etc. etc., while we’re at it. However, they don’t have very much oil.
    PS – thousands of periodicals, some going back for more than a century, have been digitized by private companies and are available mostly through libraries because they are too expensive for the average person. I’m happy to have my tax dollars go for that.

  25. Leibert Avatar
    Leibert

    I hardly think a library is a storage bin. People use it everyday for actively searching all kinds of media, including books, microfiche, periodicals, and the internet. Some even have wifi already. Not to mention that libraries have been scanning old texts for well over a decade making works available for the public. Google is late to the game, they just happen to have a little more capital.