Academics vs. technology

Last week, we had a bit of a scare: GoogleBooks suddenly stopped returning search queries. Of anything. Initially, it appeared that they no longer wanted us to be able to search inside copyrighted materials; then, those books came back, as did all the others. I haven't found any comment from Google about what was perhaps just a glitch in the code.

In any event, to say that this struck terror into the hearts of academics is not too much of an understatement. While there had already been some very longstanding issues with the search function--trying to get it to perform a keyword search within your own library has been a useless endeavor for years--the GoogleBooks library is still essential for literary historians in particular. Or, rather, it has made itself essential. The only real competitors are HathiTrust and archive.org (the latter of which sometimes has full text of public domain material that GoogleBooks only has in snippet view, for reasons unclear to, well, anyone). If you are an academic at a regional comprehensive, like yours truly, then you have only limited access to subscription databases and even more limited access to travel funds. (Even I can acquire only so many Victorian religious novels.) The free online libraries enable us to do everything from annotating (e.g., tracking down misquotations) to assembling virtual collections (e.g., Victorian novels about colportage). They're now part of the academic infrastructure, so to speak.