I used Google Book Search this morning for an essay I’m writing about Palm Springs where I talk briefly about the Salton Sea (Marc Reisner’s smart, humorous description of the origins of this weird body of water is one reason Cadillac Desert is on my Favorite Books list).
This brief PowerPoint is a brief walk-through of my GBS experience this morning. The search pointed me to a restricted book that had been provided to Google courtesy of UC Press (a press affiliated with the public university of the state I live in). That, I understand. However, nowhere obvious or even unobvious, as far as I can tell, does GBS mention that this book is available in libraries, let alone UC libraries, even though the record is plainly available in Open WorldCat. Is that what we want?
Posted on this day, other years:
- Wireless at ALA Midwinter - 2003
Nice slides. No, it doesn’t seem right to me. Anyway, I’m not sure how germane it is to your topic, but a friend from my old MFA program wrote an essay about the Salton Sea and Palm Springs and various other things (sorry about the rhyme), which you can find in Black Warrior Review (which, according to WorldCat, is available in several Bay Area libraries).
Withycombe, Amber, “Salton Sea: Some Geographies of Relocation,” Black Warrior Review 28.2.
It’s germane if you and I agree it’s germane, and I say it’s germane! The Salton Sea is absolutely fascinating. So is Palm Springs. I’ll dig up the essay.
The first five-paragraph theme I was ever asked to write (in 7th grade geography) was a comparison of the Salton Sea and the Nile River Delta. It seemed like a kind of random subject at the time, but it does keep popping up, and it is fascinating. Kudos to Mr. Browning, wherever he is.
We (schwagbag [http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/schwagbag/archives/2005/11/google_print_re.html%5D data obsessed [http://data-obsessed.renji.org/?p=236%5D and I) were talking about this, or at least I think we were talking about this, about a month ago. I sent off an email to google about a “find in a library” link – which I posted over at data obsessed. Unfortunately — they still don’t seem to be implementing it…Harumph!
Well, why should they bother to provide a “find in the library” link if they haven’t been told it’s part of the agreement? Clearly it’s not as important as pointing to online book retailers. Harumph, agreed!
No, it’s definitely not right.
Personally, I think Google Book Search and their digitisation programme are good moves forward, and to be welcomed.
However, it would definitely seem valuable to offer meaningful links permitting the borrowing of books as well as their purchase. I doubt (although without hard evidence to back it up) that sales would overly suffer as a result.
To make a compelling case to Google, though, do we not need to be able to point them to one or more sources of quality library information, the searching of which has a high likelihood of returning a transactional – and working! – link to my library?
Personally, I’d rather not be offered the feature at all, than be offered it and routinely disappointed by the lack of a place in which I could borrow the book…
If it provided a corresponding match for Open WorldCat, when one was available, that would be a big start.
If we set the hurdle too high, that’s not good either. Showing people that libraries have books, and that furthermore libraries local to THEM have books, has to be valuable. (Do we know that the bookstores listed in Google Book Search always have the books available for purchase–never out of stock, never out of print, never back-ordered?)
It can’t be that hard to add a popup box that suggests people contact their local library.
Am I being too reductive? Wouldn’t that help?
I think we need to remember that Google Books Search is about selling books (not a bad thing) and if/when libraries get some extra traffic, well that’s a nice plus. Here’s a recent quote from the NY Times about a
Google Book Search/Library Project Debate.
From the article:
Mr. [Allan] Adler [a vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers]said Google’s contention that its search program might somehow increase sales of books was speculation at best.
“When people make inquiries using Google’s search engine and they come up with references to books, they are just as likely to come to this fine institution to look up those references as they are to buy them,” he said, referring to the Public Library.
To which Google’s Mr. Drummond [Google’s general counsel] replied, “Horrors.”
More here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051120-172300
oops, quick on the send button. A few more items that might be of interest. Let’s not forget that other book digitization project both new and retrospective are out there.
1) No In-Copyright Copying for Google in Europe
http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2146578/google-digitisation-faces-euro
2) The Online Books Page keeps getting better for public domain materials.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051202-222646
An RSS feed is available for new materials as they enter the database.
3) Do enough people know about NetLibrary? I think not. They just celebrated a milestone. Over 100,000 books in their collection.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051127-222521
4) We know of ebrary for libraries but did you know they offer a free service that offers searchable access to more than 20,000 full text books. Pay to print or copy pages, about 25 cents.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3565566
5) Finally, in terms of new material I think Amazon’s Search Inside the Book (around long before Google Book Search) might be better. I find titles in their I don’t see elsewhere. Plus, many
SITB entries provide value added content to each result set. Very cool! See:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/txt/sitb.html
Karen:
Using RedLightGreen,
http://www.redlightgreen.com I searched for Cadillac Desert and then (two clicks) looked for it in libraries in California. In one minute, I found that the Berkeley Public has a copy as does many of the UC libraries via a direct link from RLG to Melvyl®.
See: http://digbig.com/4fnjh
Heck, I was even able to have the cite formatted into one of five formats and also check its availability from Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, and Powell’s. Nice!!!
That’s good, though I guess the plus over Open Worldcat is that it has links to bookstores? Otherwise what’s the big advantage?
Ok I just logged into RLG and remembered what I don’t like. The big problem for me is the institution-specific view. That may work for a lot of people, but I’d rather be able to see all libraries in a range, the way Open Worldcat does. I browse what’s available at the several libraries I use for walk-in service and also for holdings in Link Plus libraries. The links to Amazon et al. don’t matter that much–if I’m going to end up buying a book, it’s not too burdensome to look it up in Amazon.
But I do like RLG’s FRBRish view.
I have tried the Google book search and find it useful. In a way it is like browsing at a bookstore. I would not read an entire book at a store (although I guess some do), but maybe a few pages, which might give me an idea of what the book is about. Google is a different kind of search engine than the more conventional online library searches, but that can be an advantage as a supplement. For example, I typed in the words “Sometimes a Great Notion” to see what books out there mention this novel by Ken Kesey and came up with some interesting finds. If I were to search online library databases by this subject, I doubt I would have come up with the same results. Because Google book search goes by keywords in a book, rather than subject category, it is more like web surfing but can take you to interesting places. Also, if you have a Google account, such as gmail, which is free, you can view a few pages at a time; whereas if you don’t I guess it is only very small snippets.
Stephen, you’re not quite right there. Yes, registration is required for some views, but what determines how much content you can see is whether or not the book is copyrighted. If it is, then you can only see a snippet.
I’m not arguing the utility of Google Book Search; I’m concerned that it does not integrate a solid link back to real libraries for the books in its database.
Yes, you are correct, Karen. I neglected to distinguish between copyrighted and non-copyrighted books. But when I did my search I found that if I used my Google account I could view about three consecutive pages of copyrighted books; but only very brief snippets if I did not use my account. I thought google will be carrying the entire texts of non-copyrighted books in the public domain. Is that correct?
Cadillac Desert is a great book. I read it when it first came out, I was only 3 years out of the desert at that time, so it was of great interest. I loved following the link to World Cat (which I have not used before). I was disappointed at how academic the sources were. I went an looked at two local libraries who are OCLC members (one is for sure, I pay those bills!), and they both own the book although it does not show in WorldCat. I was stunned to see no reviews in World Cat since the Bridgeport Public Library catalog (www.bridgeportpubliclibrary.org) has not only an LJ review, but also the Table of Contents.
Open Worldcat doesn’t make clear that the reviews are from readers, not from any official review source. On strict usability issues both RedLightGreen and OW mystify me. I also wrote OCLC and asked why, since you CAN link to an ISBN or OCLC number, the item record doesn’t do that for you, and was told good idea blah blah blah future release blah blah blah. Geeze, dudes, hotlink the URLs. I should talk, of course, since MPOW has a few of those “good ideas” pending, too.