[Web4lib] Query: union search for online books

[Roy Tennant]

Yes, we are working hard to get records for books being digitized by Google,
the Open Content Alliance, and others into WorldCat. And as you have
probably heard, we will be integrating OAIster records as well.

However, for "legacy" materials past cataloging practices can make it rather
difficult to determine whether a URL in an 856 field points to the full-text
of an item or to some lesser portion. My colleagues in OCLC Research
presented a paper on this in 2005
<http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2005/connaway-acrl.pdf>
and I did some anecdotal research into it at
<http://roytennant.com/proto/856/>. These investigations seem to indicate
that the programming task is less straightforward than Henry Gladney
supposes, although we are talking about a relatively small number of records
compared to the numbers of digitized books that are coming along now from
the mass digitization projects.
Roy Tennant
OCLC Research


On 3/16/09 3/16/09 € 11:53 AM, "Brian Gray" <mindspiral at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are these digitized book records finding their way into WorldCat?
> 
> Brian Gray
> mindspiral at gmail.com
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Henry Gladney <hgladney at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> In recent years several giant digitizations of (mostly) out-of-copyright
>> books have been mounted, some by commercial enterprises and some by
>> academic
>> institutions.  My relatively cursory Google search has not led me to a Web
>> service from which one can mount a search that inspects a large fraction of
>> these to determine whether or not a book (or a scholarly article) is
>> available in digital form.  (I am aware of Google Book Search (see
>> http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html ) but currently
>> believe its scope to be limited.)
>> 
>> I wonder, has the kind of service been programmed and made available?  (I
>> believe that providing it would be a relatively straightforward programming
>> task.  If not, perhaps some list member will take it on.)   If you know of
>> an example, I would be grateful for a pointer to it.  I suspect that other
>> members of this distribution list would be as interested as I am.
>> 
>> Best wishes, Henry
>> 
>> H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     HMG Consulting http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/
>> (408)867-5454
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>> 
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