A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the Scripps library being closed due to budget problems. Nothing’s changed with the budget situation, but many people at Scripps and in the science community as a whole are working to mitigate this sad situation. Here’s the updates:
- Scripps library director Peter Bruggeman commented on my previous post to clarify that very few books are actually available on Google, despite being indexed. He writes:
The 100k books Google digitized from Scripps Library are almost entirely not available fulltext cover-to-cover due to copyright. Only the public domain books published before 1923 are available fulltext, and they number a thousand if I recall correctly. Google Books is an excellent tool for searching text within books, but it is not replacing books on shelf due to copyright. You can’t read those digitized books within Google Books. If you’re lucky you will see a ‘snippet’ of text and from what I’ve seen mostly not.
- The library closing received media coverage in Nature and in Library Journal.
- The students on the Save the SIO Library committee have put together a survey on SIO library use. If you have ever used the library, please take a few minutes to share your experience!
- It’s not too late to sign the petition to keep the library open! Just email your name and affiliation to SaveSIOLibrary at gmail dot com.
