Will Google sell you the access to history?

On September 7th, 1998 Larry Page i Sergey Brin registered a company named Google, placed in their friend’s garage. Ten years later the firm puts in orbit its own satellite, wants to expand its online archives with digitalized old newspapers and prepares the water-based data center patent. But the significance of rising Google domination also may affect on the futire historical researches. This is a first time when one company decides on such gigantic quantity of historical resources: old digitalized archives and books available online, but also contemporary resources such as blogs, photos, videos, documents, which can be used by historians in the future. In the case of traditional archives and digitalization Google yet has no monopoly, but in the matter of digital preservation can be a dominant player (against for example Internet Archive). The main problem is of course the free access to the resources. There is no certainty that in one day Google can establish fees for using internet content provided by its search and archival technology. The company may has no rights to the content, but has a constant surveillance on the tools for accessing it. We can’t use the content which we can’t access.

Google and content from the 18th century.

The historical context of that situation can send us back to the revolution of Gutenberg’s printing process. Distribution of the printed codexes rose the level of access to the book as a product of culture. In the future, only one way of access to the wide part of culture resources can limit possibilities of historical research.

Initiatives such as Open Content Alliance try to become a real alternative for Google aspirations. Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive.

It seems that in the future era of digital historical research the importance of tools for accessing the archival contents will be similar to the problems with the very existence of contents. Without appropriate technology we won’t be able to filter and search such a great quantity of digital data, which is even now available on the internet. Google gives us a chance to do that, but there is no certainty that it would be possible in the future.

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