Whose Text is it Anyway?

Welcome!  There are two of us creating Libral Thinking and so with a second voice, the second post commences. I, Colleen, am currently a graduate student in the School of Information, and I am working "in the field" as it were, both sitting at a reference desk, and answering patrons' questions through a chat program on the internet.  I hope to be able to add some insights into the practical and professional side of the messy nature of working in collections at this uneasy "transition" time.  (Is it a transition?  Will we keep the books?  --questions for another time.)  For today I take up the topic of the uneasy relationship for the text and the institution created in the space between the physical book on the shelf in a collection and a digitized version (copy?) on the web with access provided through Google Books.

To use Google Books, a person must type "Google" into a browser of some sort.  Each page of the book scanned by Google bears their mark, seen to the left.  It is fairly clear that it is a document scanned and provided by Google, presented by Google through their interface (and their copyright settlement).

Yet, there is a tricky problem:  The same text is marked very clearly with the institution where a physical copy (at one point?) was housed.  In the case of Essays of an Ex-Librarian by Richard Garnett, 1901, it bears a large bookplate identifying the University of Michigan. 

As a "remote reference librarian" I sit in my living room answering questions that pop-up through chat programs from patrons typing on the library website. I have already fielded multiple questions from patrons around the world asking questions resembling the following:

Patron:  Page 193 is blurry, can you scan it for me and e-mail it?
Me:  There is a button in Google's interface to report the page unreadable.
Patron: Come on...It's just a page. Can't you go get it?  At least read it to me?
Me:   No.
Patron:  Pretty please?
Me:  No, but you can request the book through Inter-Library Loan.
Patron:  But, it's just a page, and I'm in Poland.  That would take a month and I'd have to pay.
Me:  No.

Okay, okay, some of that is a lie already.  In fact, I have, on my own time, requested books to be brought over from the Buhr storage library on my own account, and I have photographed the requested page with my own digital camera and e-mailed the photo to the patron.  There is no policy for handling such requests since they are not frequent enough as of yet to be a problem.  In general, our affiliated patrons come first, but with any time left I can choose to help.

What should the response be to these types of questions?  Whose text is it when the digital scan belongs to a company providing access, but yet it never loses its association with its referent, physically housed in another place, but containing the same content?  The combination creates a lot of assumptions.  The person typing usually assumes that I am in the library, that the book still exists in the library, that it is a few feet away from me, and that it will "just take a minute."  They also assume that it is our (my) responsibility to help them, and not Google.  Maybe that is a good thing?  The library is seen as more available, and helpful than Google. The physical item in this case is more accessible since a bad scan cannot be re-scanned.

But, what do I do though when there are three other chat windows open simultaneously and it's the second Google verification request of my shift?  As the face of a "public" research university, who is my patron?  Should I have levels?  Shouldn't the students come first?  How does a local or state institution fund reference services for a public that through those bookplates and our availability on the web becomes a global audience?    Does the whole library become a reference for the digital in that we should make plans duplication charges like for a closed-stack special library?  Are physical books now a "Special Collection" in relation to the digital?

These questions cannot just remain fuzzy since the digitized texts constitute the memory of our culture.  In some sense we all own them since the memories in the texts lie in the spaces between people, sustained by references to the texts each time we read one, think about it, and add it to our store of knowledge that we share with others as we live and chat over coffee.  For now (most of) the physical books that Google references remain in the libraries, but many people unable to see the blurry details behind "the cloud" call for the practical destruction or selling-off of the books and their pricy buildings and air-conditioning as a practical necessity, not seeing the physical servers, fiber optic cable, and software with quick obsolescence upon which a digitized collection such as Google Books collection relies.  We must define our relationship, and take ownership and responsibility for it, or just like the stack of corroded 51/4 inch floppy disks that hold the games my father programmed for me that sit next to a failed Commodore PET disk drive in my closet, the entirety of our cultural memory could become inaccessible while we pay attention to shinier things.