Google Books follow up: > or < the sum of its parts?

I have not yet received a response to my request for more specifics on metadata import -- "Deear Googlez, plz giv more metadata info. Lov, Ramona." Keep your fingers crossed everyone.

An answer in About Google Books states, "We use automated methods to analyze the book, and in some cases we use content from third-party sources; as a result, we're currently unable to accept any manual edits to information that's displayed in the 'Related books,' 'Contents,' 'Key terms,' 'References from books,' 'References from scholarly works' or 'Selected pages' sections."

I can't think why automating import of metadata would preclude future changes to it, except that "manual edits" as they put it, would be very time consuming if not properly crowd-sourced. It is interesting that they state this, since according to the Nunberg article that Meg wrote about last week, "Dan Clancy also suggests that users could fix the errors one by one, in the way they fix errors on Wikipedia."

Google does offer a connection to some library metadata via a link to WorldCat ("Find in a Library"). However, if the metadata for the book is incorrect, this link would, no doubt, be incorrect as well, so that the right information in WorldCat would be linked with the wrong book.

As for the Google Books API, Dan Cohen wrote this blog post in 2008. He said then that although Google had just released their API, it was aptly and opaquely named the "Google Book Search Book Viewability API." Cohen writes that the API does not allow enough access for scholars to mine the full text even of pre-1923 books -- public domain books that are out of copyright -- nor does it allow for the creation of enough tools besides simple viewing and search tools.
Related to our discussion of the API last week, he lists what can be done with it. It is a start:

• Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
• Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
• Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
• Generate links to an informational page about a book
• Generate links to a preview of a book

If you want to find out more about the Google Books API, you can visit the page here.

The recent interest in the Google Books settlement has come because Tuesday was the deadline for filing court briefs for the case. EFF and Microsoft, two organizations I think rarely filing briefs on the same side of a case, both participated in the opposition. Read more here.

And finally, as to what universities or libraries might get out of a Google Books agreement, U-M posted this, which I noted says, "The agreement also calls for Google to contribute millions of dollars to establish up to two new research centers." Some of the contacts are publicly available here. According to the Google page, "... we can say that all of them are non-exclusive." I like Stanford sites, and found their page on the agreement with Google Books to be the most informative.

I think that like it or not, Google Books has it's own (cyber)infrastructure, and is a curation project. Although Google, and other digital curation projects, may not employ anyone that fits our mental image of a curator, digital projects are large and complex and probably necessitate the addition of structures that support the addition of sense-making data (or metadata?) to collections rather than individual curation efforts that may have been traditional in the past.
Below: The first result from Google images for the search term, "curator." -- Right after it were images of an enemy(?) from World of Warcraft.