Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 232p. Hardcover, $25.99 (ISBN: 978-0691172712).

Abstract

The impact of digital technology on academic libraries has been discussed and debated a great deal over the years, but the elephant in the room often remains Google. Whether more formally or less, contributions to the professional conversation that take the long view and consider the full, ongoing range of Google’s impact seem hard to find, even as that impact is ubiquitous and undeniable. On the backends of their systems, in the interstices of their workflows, and on the front lines of their services, research libraries depend on and deploy any number of the company’s apps, tools, and projects, to say nothing of the consequences and influence of Google search itself. It is therefore a welcome and valuable contribution to the professional literature that Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld make in their work, Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization. As the subtitle suggests, the authors offer a perspective based on the passage of time—call it recent history, and in some sense official history too, as the heart of this book derives from interviews conducted by Marcum and Schonfeld (both of Ithaka S+R) with the key players in what was originally called Google Print (now Google Books). This is an interesting inside story of how Google came to partner nearly two decades ago with a handful of major research libraries to digitize their scholarly collections. It does not avoid the shortcomings of a top-down history, including the tendency to speak in the voice of Silicon Valley promotion, but it is a timely and apt primer on the significance of what happened then and what may yet follow.