[Web4lib] Google Print

[Richard Wiggins]

To put it a different way, Google has a great deal of faith in robots AND in
search. Look at Google News. Though I've seen some evidence that Google News
co-operates with some major news sources to get direct feeds, by and large
the crawler screen scrapes, and an index decides what becomes headlines
based on how many news sources cover the same story.
 So gathering, indexing, ranking, AND searching are all done roboticly.
Google's approach is never to do by hand what a robot can do well enough.
 Down the road, you've got to believe that Google Print (and its competitors
at Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Europe, etc.) will take direct feeds of book
content and metadata (such as it is) from publishers.
 For the digitizing project, it seems a fair question to ask if Google Print
fully exploits the existing catalog records for each book out of the
cooperating libraries. They say a library spends as much money on an
original catalog entry as they do to buy most books. So the manual labor has
already been paid for by the libraries themselves.
 (Hmmm, another way in which Google may be getting an incredibly good deal.)
 /rich
 On 11/8/05, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> I think Jennifer and I are on the same page... (so to speak!). If a
> bibliographic item already has the metadata, why not use it in Google
> Print?
> Though then the argument would be that all items need good metadata... and
> Google's approach is that everything can be solved through search... which
> would mean either automated metadata (which has got to be within a leap of
> what they're doing) or something beyond metadata that enriches retrieval.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
>
>
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