Oceanography library enters the digital era

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Century-old books kept behind a locked gate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library have been digitized by Google Books and made accessible to researchers and scholars worldwide. — John Gibbins / Union-Tribune

OLD TOMES

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library contributed about 100,000 volumes to the Google Books online library. They include:

“The Stalk-Eyed Crustacea,” by Walter Faxon, 1895 — Specimens were collected during an expedition to Central and South America and the Galapagos Islands by researchers aboard the Albatross. The ship was built by the U.S. government for marine research and was a precursor to today’s fleet of research vessels.

“The Fishes of the Swedish South Polar Expedition,” by Einar Lonnberg, 1905 — Researchers documented species collected on a famous Antarctic expedition. The outing was a scientific success but the explorers’ ship was crushed by ice, forcing the crew to build and live in a stone hut on an Antarctic island until they were rescued.

“The Medusae,” by Henry Bigelow, 1909 — Bigelow was the founding director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, a world leader in ocean science.

“The Land and Sea Mammals of Middle America and the West Indies,” by Daniel Giraud Elliot, 1904 — Elliot was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Inside the library at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, rows of century-old books that chart the beginnings of modern oceanography are guarded behind a locked gate.

Some chronicle famous treks to the South Pole, while others describe more obscure adventures, such as a “plankton expedition” in the 1880s. All of them are deemed too fragile or valuable to leave in the general stacks.

A pioneering project by Scripps and Google Books has figuratively unlocked the gate and made the institution’s vast resources available online. Over the past 1½ years, they have digitized an estimated 100,000 volumes from the La Jolla library as part of a broader effort to put texts online.

Through word and phrase searching, Google users can identify and review nearly half of Scripps’ books from their computer without setting foot on the lower campus of the University of California San Diego. They have similar access to works housed at universities from Stanford to Oxford.

The collaboration makes the world’s largest collection of oceanographic books more widely accessible than ever but it also raises questions about the future of the library and other temples of academic works.

Peter Brueggeman, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, calls Google Books’ search engine “a game-changer for scholarly research” but not one that will lead to the demise of libraries.

“I don’t feel like we are losing anything except our role as a paper warehouse,” Brueggeman said. “Our core mission hasn’t changed. We are still acquiring information.”

Regardless, library leaders are strategizing about how to maintain their relevance. The international consortium Libraries in the Digital Age held a conference in Croatia last month to address such issues.

“We like to say that Google can give you 5,000 responses (to a query) but it will be the librarian who will help you find the right and most appropriate response to your question,” said Camila Alire, president of the American Library Association.

Google Books, launched in 2004 as Google Print, has digitized more than 12 million volumes. That effort has spurred lawsuits by publishers and others who accuse Google of infringing on copyrights and trying to create a monopoly in the digital marketplace.

“We don’t have a set number of volumes or an end date in mind as a goal,” said Ramsey Allington, a manager at Google, which is based in Mountain View. “Our mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. This work may never end as new discoveries are made and new things become searchable.”

Allington said the company doesn’t disclose details about the digitization process, such as where the work is done and how long each book takes. A spokeswoman for UCSD said no money changed hands, but Scripps received digital copies of the texts in exchange for giving Google access.

The university’s officials will track library usage carefully to calculate the Google effect. They aren’t sure how the project will alter the number of visits to the physical library — about 46,000 a year now — or how the collection is used by researchers, students and the public.

Some people will find everything they need online, but librarians think they will get a boost from others who want to read the physical pages. Many volumes are available in full while others are limited to snippets to respect copyrights.

“We just see the access and discovery being so much more enhanced by being able to make our resources available where everybody is searching” on Google, said Martha Hruska, a UCSD librarian who worked on the digitization project. “This is just sort of integrating into where so many people are.”

Hruska said the books were selected for digitization by Google after the company’s leaders compared a list of Scripps’ holdings to works they already had in electronic form. That process started in January 2009.

“We were able to do what we call a ‘bulk pull,’ where the staff would come and take full shelves off and load them up” for shipment to Google, Hruska said. “They would come back in about two weeks.”

Renowned Scripps scientist Walter Munk mostly does his research online, but he laments the lack of people who show up at the library.

“Most of the journals are digitized. You look them up from wherever you work, your office or home,” Munk said. “But I think that something is lost by people not walking around stacks and looking at books.”

Nonetheless, Munk is pleased that his 1995 title “Ocean Acoustic Tomography” was digitized by Google. It’s a hopeful sign for him that people will be referencing his work for decades.

“The book is out of print and no one is going to go through the expense of a reprint,” he said. “If you are not asked to have your book digitized, I think it shows that nobody really cares about it.”

The Scripps collection covers subjects including oceanography, climate science and geophysics, zoology, fisheries and seismology and has works printed in 19 languages.

About 45 percent of Scripps’ books were scanned by Google even after the company had visited several of the nation’s best-known universities, including Cornell, Princeton and Harvard.

“That tells you how rich this collection is,” Brueggeman said. “It’s like, boom! Gold mine.”

The work with Scripps was largely done by the start of June, though library officials said a few large-format volumes remained for scanning.

The library started in 1905 when the institution established a lab at La Jolla Cove. As the institution’s reputation spread, research groups and campuses around the world regularly sent their journals to La Jolla because they wanted their scientists’ writings to be read by top oceanographers at Scripps.

In addition, Scripps benefited from professors who bequeathed their personal collections, including one who went on a book-buying spree in Europe before World War II, to boost its holdings.

The library’s collection includes books from as far back as the 1500s but those were too fragile to send to Google. Brueggeman shipped at least one volume from 1837 to Google, though he said there may be a few older ones.

Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at Scripps, said online access to age-old documents will help students and historians better understand the evolution of modern ideas.

One of Levin’s assignments in a deep-sea biology class involves tracking an idea or species group from the earliest writings to modern times.

“Scientists in (the 1700s and 1800s) made some extremely astute observations. Most have been lost to the general scientific community simply because the documents reporting them have not been accessible,” Levin said. “Those early observations … may hold the key to understanding conditions and ecosystems of the past, which will help us in coming to grips with the future.”

Mike Lee: (619) 293-2034; mike.lee@uniontrib.com; Twitter, @sdenvirobeat

Copyright © 2016, The San Diego Union-Tribune
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