Ingenjörer skriver bokhistoria

Ars Technica skriver lite om Googles uppskattning av hur många böcker det finns i världen (129 864 880 stycken = förmodligen skitsnack, med tanke på hur mycket man vet om Googles metadata-härke ("a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess", som Geoff Nunberg uttryckte det)). Men de har en bra idé om hur det ska kunna åtgärdas:

The best the search giant can do is acknowledge and embrace the fact that it's now the newest, most junior member of an ancient and august guild of humanists, and let its new colleagues participate in the process of fixing and maintaining its metadata archive. After all, why should Google's engineers be attempting to do art history? Why not just focus on giving new tools to actual historians, and let them do their thing? The results of a more open, inclusive metadata curation process might never reveal how many books their really are in the world, but they would do a vastly better job of enabling scholars to work with the library that Google is building