Via O’reilly Radar I found a blog post that is definitely worth reading. If you haven’t already read it, you should. Also read O’reilly as he comments on why digitization of full-text is important and provides a few other links.

I was idly trying a search on "roads" to see what sort of a literature would turn up for the period of my dissertation research, 1740-1850. I didn't expect much. I've spent the last two years wandering through the Yale, Harvard, and California libraries, the British Library, Britain's National Archives, and the immense reserves of North American Inter Library Loan reading every book on London, pavement, or travel I could get my hands on. Surprise. In a single idle search I just added twenty extra full-text books to my list.

And later:

Research in my world is very often a personal matter of haggling for more time with the particular librarian in question. They're used to us, and I figure they need a good struggle to keep them alert. But thanks to Google Book Search, these days of scavenger-hunt and tug-of-war are drawing to an end.

And a reply post from someone who believes libraries have a strong future in the space:

Ms. Guldi, you have been too kind. Libraries ought to have served you better and you deserve more than apologies, you deserve a better library. But you’ve been too kind to Google, too. I’d like to see a new title, picked to pique an activist, something along the lines of how free text searching and mass digitization are changing academic history, and how Google books is leveraging its technological capital to take ownership of the means of access to our heritage.