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• Google Books Just Can't Get It Right

  Google Book Search has a new front page that is heading in such a completely wrong direction that I can only conclude that the problems I cited in 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 recent blog entries are unfixable. They've gone to a "featured books" layout with categories much like a chain bookstore. Have they now given up any pretense that this is a library? The Inside Google Book Search blog entry announcing this new home page begins: "Every time I go into a bookstore or library, I go straight to the sports section, to check out the newest books on running." I'm sure this is a perfectly honest statement — except possibly for the "or library" part — but what relevance does it have to a repository of mostly old books and periodicals? Instead of locating the newest books on running, what if someone wants to use Google Book Search to research some of the oldest books and magazine articles on running? Searches based on date are potentially the most powerful aspect of a repository such as Google Read More... Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007 6:22 PM from Charles Petzold | 1 Comments Filed under: Google Books

• Google Books Needs to Know What They Have

  I don't know if anybody remembers this any more, but back in the mid-to-late1990s there was actually a debate about the relative utility of web directories and web search engines. Yahoo, for example, offered a human-edited directory that separated the web's contents into categories and sub-categories, much like the systems used to categorize books in a library. Early web search engines tended to be less useful because they could easily be tricked. It wasn't until search engines became much more sophisticated that web directories began seeming unnecessarily limited in scope. This is Google's claim to fame. Web search is now so sophisticated and so dominant that the very idea of revisiting the directory concept seems perverse. Yet, a human-edited directory is what may be required to transform Google Books into an actual usable online library. As an example, let's take philosopher John Stuart Mill's 1843 book A System of Logic , which was a highly influential book in the 19th century but isn't Read More... Posted Monday, September 10, 2007 9:11 AM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: Google Books

• Google Books Needs to List the Issues

  If you read anything much at all about the Victorian era, you've undoubtedly come across references to The Edinburgh Review , a quarterly published between 1802 and 1929. The Wikipedia entry on The Edinburgh Review calls it "one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century." Having easy access to the issues of this periodical is one of the many benefits of an online service such as Google Books . And if we're only interested in the issues published in the 19th century, there should be no copyright issues. So let's type "Edinburgh Review" into Google Books and see what we get. Google Books indicates 22,136 hits, but here's the top of the first page: Many of these hits are apparently books and reprints with the words "Edinburgh Review" in their titles. But to get to the actual issues of the magazine requires a trick: You need to click "More editions" in the first hit. Here's what you get: This actually looks encouraging: Despite the uniform date of 1929 — curiously Read More... Posted Sunday, September 09, 2007 12:06 PM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: Google Books

• Google Books Needs to be More Like JSTOR

  When I first heard about Google's plan to scan the contents of the major libraries of the world, it seemed like a great idea, but it wasn't books I was considering. Books are certainly important, and it would be great to perform searches across collections of books. But books are already well catalogued by libraries, and it's fairly straightforward to hunt down books that touch on particular topics. Instead, I was anticipating a revolution in researching periodicals. It is in centuries worth of periodicals — everything from scholarly journals with circulations in the hundreds to popular magazines and newspapers — that I think most of the world's collective knowledge is encapsulated. This is where digitization would compensate for the historic deficiencies in periodical cataloguing. Cataloguing these periodicals would mean treating each issue as an entity in itself, but also treating it as a collection of articles with distinct titles and authors. For example, if two articles Read More... Posted Saturday, September 08, 2007 12:59 PM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: Google Books

• Google Books: A Bibliographic Disaster

  This is not a blog entry by an author who thinks that Google Books is evil because it promotes the idea of free books. This is a blog entry by an author who sees Google Books as an invaluable research tool but who gets frustrated and enraged every time he tries to use it. I know there's a Feedback page on Google Books where problems can be reported. But the problems I experience are so fundamental that the Feedback page seems grossly adequate. In short, Google Books seems to have been put together with a deficient sense of bibliographic integrity, which is a real problem if you're trying to assemble an online library. Here's today's real-life example: I wanted to get a sense of the historic occurrence of the phrase "Turing Machine" in books and periodicals published since the phrase was first coined by Alonzo Church in the March 1937 issue of The Journal of Symbolic Logic in a review of Alan Turing's 1936 paper that introduced the concept. I was most interested in the earliest references Read More... Posted Friday, September 07, 2007 12:44 PM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: Google Books