The recent announcement that Google would digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long - dreamed - of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infrin...

The recent announcement that Google would digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long - dreamed - of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infrin...

This publication draws upon historical milestones to explore the meaning of 'universal knowledge' as well as the process of collecting, structuring, designing, and publishing it.

In The Demise of the Library School, Richard J. Cox places the present and future of professional education for librarianship in the debate on the modern corporate university. The book is a series of meditations on critical themes relating to the education of librarians, archivists, and other information professionals, playing off of other commentators analyzing the nature of higher education and its problems and promises.

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

This text argues that activities which appear to be timeless are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The book also tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization.

An incisive history of the controversial Google Books project and the ongoing quest for a universal digital library Libraries have long talked about providing comprehensive access to information for everyone. But when Google announced in 2004 that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today. Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld draw on in-depth interviews with those who both embraced and resisted Google's plans, from librarians and technologists to university leaders, tech executives, and the heads of leading publishing houses. They look at earlier digital initiatives to provide open access to knowledge, and describe how Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made the case for a universal digital library and drew on their company's considerable financial resources to make it a reality. Marcum and Schonfeld examine how librarians and scholars organized a legal response to Google, and reveal the missed opportunities when a settlement with the tech giant failed. Along Came Google sheds light on the transformational effects of the Google Books project on scholarship and discusses how we can continue to think imaginatively and collaboratively about expanding the digital availability of knowledge.