The Googlization of Everything

Karen Coyle wants to know:

OK, maybe I'm just in a particularly bad mood, but I guess I've just about had it with libraries shooting themselves in the foot. Then letting gangrene set in and going for amputation.

I'm talking about not sharing the data we have. We've all heard the complaints that the Web community is going forward "reinventing the wheel" in terms of bibliographic data. But then when anyone shows an interest in our bibliographic data, we withhold like the anal retentives we are. (Wow, I must be in an extraordinarily bad mood!)

We've just learned that OCLC is sharing its data with Google, and that libraries can download records for Google books from OCLC -- although there was no mention of the "usual fee," which I'm sure applies. I happen to know that Google receives a full bibliographic record with each book that it digitizes. I have no idea what they do with that data because it doesn't appear on the screen in Google Book Search. What is significant is that the quality data that has been created by libraries is still essentially invisible to most users of the Internet. Do you still wonder why we are overlooked by most of the information seeking population? How can they possibly know what we've done to organize the bibliographic world if we won't let them see? ...