At Harvard, a Man, a Plan and a Scanner - New York Times

At Harvard, a Man, a Plan and a Scanner - New York Times:

Twenty years ago, when Sidney Verba became director of the Harvard University Library, he thought there was a good chance he would enjoy a placid transition into retirement.

Sidney Verba, director of Harvard’s libraries, hopes searchable digital copies of books on Google would draw students to the actual books.

Placid is not the word Mr. Verba would use to describe his life now. “Challenging” or “exciting” would better fit the bill, he said, choosing his words carefully.

Mr. Verba is overseeing the university’s partnership with Google, which plans to create searchable digital copies of entire collections - tens of millions of books - at five leading research libraries.

[boring recitation of status quo omitted]

[lame money shot begins]

“We think and hope it is legally the appropriate approach,” Mr. Verba said of the Google project. “But we’re taking it day by day.”

[/lame money shot]

An irritatingly inconclusive article that gives far too much deference to the profilee’s ostensibly neutral position. In actuality, Harvard is one of Google’s key allies in Google Book Search. Their defection from the project would be global news and you can be absolutely sure that Google is cultivating Harvard assiduously.

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