Google Meets Publishers and Librarians

REPORT FROM THE FIELD

Google's objective maybe to make knowledge available to everyone, but just how well is it fulfilling that mission, and how are its acti vi tie s impacting the infor- mation industry, especially publishers and librarians? That was the core of a forum titled Google, the Web,

About 60 attendees were present for the meeting, which was bracketed with a keynote address by Stephen Arnold, president of Arnold Information Technology, and an endnote by Roy Tennant, senior program officer at OCLC Programs and Research. Additional speakers representing content providers, abstracting-and-indexing services, and libraries discussed how Google has affected them. As a special feature to this event, those not attending the forum could do so virtually (see sidebar).

Google: Past, Present, and Future

Although Google is a secretive company, it has patented many of its inventions and therefore has publicly disclosed much of its technology. Arnold, who has done an exhaustive study of Google's patents, inferred some of its business strategies from these patents and has authored several books on his findings, the latest of which is titled Google: The Digital Gutenberg. Arnold's research shows that Google has moved beyond a search engine to play an influential and complex role in the information industry.