[Web4lib] Google Books a tease, not a useful tool, for serious research

[Coleman, Ronald]

I always viewed Google Books as a discovery tool that could help serious
researchers locate books they can use for their research.  I don't think
of it as its own standalone research tool.  It doesn't replace the copy
sitting on the library shelves, but it can lead you to that copy when
other tools (library catalogs, journal databases, etc) cannot.  It's
simply another tool in a researcher's "toolbox" of research techniques.

The example I always use when working with researchers is this: Once, at
the reference desk, I was approached by a historian who was looking for
information on a Romanian businessman from the 1930s named Nicolae
Malaxa.  The historian had already looked through all the books on the
Holocaust in Romania that were in the DS135 R& section--including all
the books he himself had written on the subject--and came up with
nothing.  We searched JSTOR, Project Muse, and all the other usual
suspects, and found nothing.  Before he walked away, I pulled up Google
Books and tried searching for "Nicolae Malaxa."  The very first hit was
for a book entitled "Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America," which is
a title we would never have considered before.  I used the catalog to
locate the book on our shelves and, sure enough, there was an entire
chapter on Malaxa.  Again, Google Books didn't replace the book on the
shelf; it was merely a tool we used to discover it.  In this regard,
Google Books (and A9, Microsoft Live Book Search, et al) is a useful and
valuable tool that augments other search techniques.

Your concerns are valid and understandable, but from my perspective it
seems like you are trying to make this service out to be something it is
not.


Ron Coleman
Reference Librarian
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC  20024 


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Richard Wiggins
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2007 8:22 AM
To: Web4Lib
Subject: [Web4lib] Google Books a tease, not a useful tool,for serious
research

I think we've plumbed these troubled waters before, but my experience
over
the last two days has me shaking my head, wondering if Google really
considers Google Book a serious research tool.

To me, to be useful, a research tool needs these features:

-- You must be able to cite what you find. You must be able to provide a
reference that others can follow in order to retrieve exactly what you
retrieved.

-- You must be able to quote it.  That is, you must be able to copy text
from it and paste that text into an article, an e-mail, whatever.

-- You must be able to reproduce the search that found the item.

-- You must be able to search within the full text.

-- Others must be able to do all of these things.

As a matter of sport in the last couple days I've been trying to chase
down
a matter of historical fact:  is the proper name of a thoroughfare in
East
Lansing "Harrison Road" or is it "Harrison Avenue."  This has been a fun
research project worthy of History Detectives (except the subject matter
is
a lot more boring than their tales).

Google Book Search offered some tantalizing evidence from the Michigan
public laws of 1907.  What was especially cool was that the book was
digitized by the University of California just this past May.

Here's what's not cool:

-- My first search revealed the tantalizing tidbit re the founding of
East
Lansing, when Harrison Avenue was a boundary of the town.

--- For some reason, subsequent searches did not pull up that tidbit,
but
rather metadata about the volume.

-- And now, unless I'm losing my mind, repeats of the same searches
don't
even find that volume.

-- I was able to find the URL in my browser cache, in this bizarre form
(not
even sure it will paste)   http://books.google.com/books?id=_VUyAAAAIAAJ
....  (In my browser address bar the upper case AAAs are crossed out.)

-- If you manage to locate the PDF and download it, of course you cannot
search it, because it is a PDF stripped of Acrobat power; the pages are
images, and not searchable.  This is a volume with 1200 pages.  Eyeball
scanning for the text that Google Book Search once coughed up on screen
is a
waste of time and an insult.

Again, I know we've covered some of this turf, but doesn't the
combination
of these facts destroy the value of Google Book Search as a serious
research
tool?

Google seems to be paranoid about others mining their data.  Do they
actually change search behavior to limit the number of searches for a
book?
If so it's obviously preventing reproducibility of research and even
opening
the door to denial of service.

/rich
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