[Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

[Richard Wiggins]

Trying out Google Book Search is thrilling but puzzling.  A customer
recently asked why she had a document dated 1908 that refers to Michigan
Agricultural College, when the official history says it got that name in
1909.  Just a few Google Book searches shows that even before it was
founded, people called the school MAC informally.

Here's what puzzles me:

-- Where's the metadata?  My guess is this book was scanned from the
collection at the University of Michigan, but I don't see any credits.  It
seems that at the very least the libraries contributing to this corpus would
want credit.  And maybe I want to borrow it via ILL or physically go to the
library and check it out!  (There are links to Amazon and others to buy a
print copy.)

-- The downloadable PDF appears to be images wrapped in PDF, not OCRed
text.  That means I can't search it locally, and I can't copy text from it
to use in a research paper.  Is this correct?

-- What's the error rate?  Google lists the particular document I found as
being published in 1850.  The document is from 1856.

-- Does Google Books have anything approximating a "call number"?!?!  If I
want to cite a book I don't want to use a URL like
http://books.google.com/books?vid=0_lzyH2whxrKae&id=Atei8YelmlQC&dq=%22michigan+agricultural+college%22+acts&as_brr=1


 -- I also found some searches that failed but by Boolean logic should have
worked.

/rich