Over the past 2 years, trade journals, magazines, and newspapers have been publishing articles about Google Book Search. But even if you had read every one of them, you still wouldn’t know much about the project itself, because most of the discussion has focused on the copyright controversy with little about the database and how it works. So here are the details.
Book Search is difficult to research because the Google site has little documentation about the project: There’s no list of participating publishers, no guidelines for the book selection process, no status reports on the library scanning program, etc. This is not only annoying, it’s hypocritical for an organization with a mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Book Search has three book search services: 1) a library union catalog search of WorldCat and others, 2) books scanned from library collections, and 3) in-stock books provided by publishers. It’s ironic that the first and most innovative of these is overlooked, while the second and most rudimentary and problem-ridden gets all of the attention....
Péter Jacsó, Google Book Search, Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, November 2006. Excerpt:
I skip the legal and/or ethical pros and cons in the case; there are many substantial sources to let you see both sides of the coin, and legal cases are pending. Here is an excellent bibliography by Charles Bailey. I focus on what is the current content; what is accessible; and how the software helps and prevents finding materials. Only a small segment of the books and other print materials seem to be available free in their entirety. For this column, I approach it primarily from the ready reference perspective, where even snippets of information can be useful....
I almost always discuss the software at the end of the review, but here I must make an exception and bring up serious software problems that confuse even veteran searchers, and distort or make enigmatic some results. Even with simple searches, there is enough confusion because of the ignorance, illiteracy and innumeracy of the software.
The most startling problem is the incorrect use of the Boolean OR operation....Most search programs make it easy to limit the search to the title field, the publication year and some other fields. Google serves up strange results....The handling of fully viewable books is inconsistent in GBS, and therefore the results are unpredictable. Sometimes they are included in the All Books search, sometimes not; sometimes some of the fully viewable books are included in the All Books search, but not the others....It certainly discombobulates the users when hits are reported in terms of pages rather than books....
As is usual with Google services, it is not possible to determine through special searches how many items there are in the database, or get factual information about other aspects of the content, such as the distribution of items by publication year (at least by broad range, such as for the last decade)....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/03/2006 10:48:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
