Gorman slams digitisation. Conference keynote speaker accuses librarians of being too techie and the industry of wasting money on scholarly texts.

Byline: Tracey Caldwell.

Controversy broke out over the Google digitisation project last month, when Michael Gorman, outspoken head of the American Library Association, slammed it as a waste of money. Speaking at the Online Information Conference, Gorman also attacked librarians for being "too interested in technology".

His comments have met with opposition from librarians. "The Google project has been enthusiastically embraced and I think that is a mistake. I am not speaking on behalf of the ALA. That has no position on the Google digitisation project. I, on the other hand, do," said Gorman.

Gorman believes money is being wasted on digitising an enormous number of scholarly texts that are rarely used at the moment. "So we digitise - I would prefer to say atomise. Very little-used books are reduced to a bunch of paragraphs, searchable by free text searching, the very worst kind of searching."

His concerns about contextualisation, and the dangers of accessing parts of a book without reading the whole, are widely shared.

But his views have also met high-level resistance. Elizabeth Niggemann, head of the German National Library, said: "More digitisation is needed. If things are little used they will be used less if they are available only in print."

Niggemann said the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), which has developed the European Library portal access to digitised resources, is not against ...