I love the concept but these days I mostly wonder how long it will last before getting the Reader treatment and what that will mean for the partners who are using it for their best-quality web presence.
Ha! When Google is fighting battles with all sorts of European regulators, it's a VERY smart idea to point to where they're investing in European culture. This isn't going away anytime soon...
> World is impermanent, the internet world magnifies this tenfold. Things will get ever more transient.
You do realize that we're talking about institutions dedicated to preserving history, right? People work in cultural heritage are justly concerned not only with preserving the physical artifact but making it easy to access. For people in this field “future” usually means decades or centuries, a few business quarters.
If they spend time promoting a Google service, they're not building their own presence or the capacity needed to support it — if Google gets tired of paying for this and all of those links break, there's nothing to show for the time they're investing now.
You're talking extremes, which is a little funny considering the time scales of all the links in the chain: artifact/art (millennia to centuries), museums (centuries to decades), google inc (?).
It is a shame google is aiming at Institutions that don't have the resources to know better than to trust them.. meanwhile their usage rights exists in perpetuity.. not simply for duration of the project..
