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Michael Madison

Michigan Prez on Google Book Search

Well, someone reads this blog, I’m happy to say. I just received an email from an aide to University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman, attaching the full text of a speech that President Coleman delivered today to the Association of American Publishers. The title of the talk is “Google, the Khmer Rouge and the Public Good,” which gives you a sense of just how boring and typically academic it is. You can download the full text here. [pdf] A taste:

The Google Book project was announced with great fanfare in December 2004. The crux of this project was that great library collections would now be searchable for anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

The global library was under way. It was no longer a question of “whether,” but rather “how” and “when.”

New technologies and new ideas can generate some pretty scary reactions, and Google Book Search has not been immune. The project, for all that it promises, has been challenged: on the editorial page, across the airwaves, and, with your organization’s endorsement, in the court system.

It is this criticism of the project that prompted me to accept your invitation to speak — and explain why we believe this is a legal, ethical, and noble endeavor that will transform our society.

Legal because we believe copyright law allows us the fair use of millions of books that are being digitized. Ethical because the preservation and protection of knowledge is critically important to the betterment of humankind. And noble because this enterprise is right for the time, right for the future, right for the world of publishing, right for all of us.

The University of Michigan educates tens of thousands of students, and is home to faculty engaged in extraordinary work. We represent the citizens of Michigan and the citizens of the world. And we embody the aspirations of a society that looks to great public research universities for solutions, cures, and answers.

Those responsibilities and obligations make it abundantly clear to me, as president, that the Google project is a remarkable opportunity — and a natural evolution — for a university whose mission is to create, to communicate, to preserve and to apply knowledge.

This is, simply, what we do and why we exist.

There’s more.

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