Is Google Books a research tool (a super duper index) or a library?  Kevin Kelly raises this question in his comment the “Google Books Exchange” between Paul Duguid and Patrick Leary, and it became a framing question for 2008 MLA session on The Library of Google: Researching Scanned Books. During the panel, I discussed how I’m using Google Books in a project to remix my 2002 dissertation on bachelorhood and American culture as a work of digital scholarship.  (See my Powerpoint slides for the details.)  Out of the crowd of about 35 or 40 attendees, all but one raised their hands when I asked if they thought that Google Books was, on balance, good for humanities scholarship.  But some significant reservations emerged during the follow-up discussion.  A descriptive bibliographer emphasized the importance of consulting the print volume for bibliographic details such as illustrations, paper quality, etc.  Several English professors indicated that they use Google Books to indentify relevant materials, but then consult the print, presuambly because they trust it more and want to see the complete physical volume.  One attendee worried that her library would no longer get books for her via interlibrary loan, but instead refer her to Google Books; another expressed fear that libraries are shifting away from physical collections.  A scholar who works on the history of reading noted that the ability to find research sources rapidly may be diluting the quality of scholarship, as contemporary researchers make unfounded assumptions that just because they can use Google Books to detect connections between two works means that the connections are real, that one writer read the other.   Another scholar noted that Google Books is not fully available outside of the US, limiting collaboration with international scholars.  At the same time, though, the audience was enthusiastic about the ability to search across millions of books for words and phrases.  Although the discussion was certainly not an authoritative study of humanists’ attitudes towards Google Books, I do think it was indicative of both the enthusiasm that they have towards it as a research tool and their fears that it may supplant the research library.

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