Head librarian at University of Michigan supports $125m Google Book Search settlement

Google’s Good Deal for Libraries
The Washington Post, May 24, 2009
By Paul N. Courant

In his May 19 op-ed, "A Book Grab by Google," Brewster Kahle said that a court settlement involving Google, if approved, "would produce not one but two court-sanctioned monopolies. Google will have permission to bring under its sole control information that has been accessible through public institutions for centuries. In essence, Google will be privatizing our libraries."

As the steward of one of those libraries, a library that has had some 3 million of its works digitized by Google, let me assure readers that Google will not have a monopoly on the information [...]

Read the entire op-ed piece in The Washington Post.

Paul N. Courant is university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan.