RE: Google Print Home Page now offers searching

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Dear Jim,

When used this way as a search tool it is probably closest to think of it
as an expanded bibliographic index.  Once the book has been identified,
then it can be obtained through normal sources--one's own library,
interlibrary loan, etc.

For the out-of-copyright books that are available, it will also serve for
reading them.  It obviously cannot be used for books still in
copyright--except possibly by users at that unversity that owned the
specific book scanned. (I say "possibly, "  because this use may or may
not be permissible-- this is the AAUP position in their lawsuit, which I
hope will be soon compromised. )

Certainly it is frustrating to see just a small window.  It's similar to
getting an abstract from an indexing service, in cases where the actual
journal article is not immediately obtainable -- or perhaps not obtainable
at all.

Not even Google intends this as the solution to all literature access
problems.  Even in its current state, its a good deal more than we have
ever had-- except perhaps in dreams, where some people, including myself,
sometimes read wonderful books that unfortunately do not exist in the
print or electronic worlds.

David G.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Dr. James J. O'Donnell
Sent: Sun 6/5/2005 5:58 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Google Print Home Page now offers searching
 
The surprising aspect of this is the size and variety of the academic
collection of humanities titles that is covered by a search here.  But the
absolutely maddening aspect is that this kind of search-by-snippets is of
very limited use and so cripples the normal function of a "book" as to be
a form of torture.  On a typical search you are allowed to read the page
on which the search term appears and the two pages before and after. Now,
in one case, because I know the book, I was able to figure out a search
term that would probably let me see *almost* every page of the book, as
long as I were willing to do a cumbersome sequence of clicks to "page"  
through the book.  But the natural use of the book consequent to such a
search -- "aha, he talks about X, so let me look at the context" -- is
what you can't do.

(That clever link to search almost every page will be defeated because in
every title, a set of pages has been made inaccessible to display:  "As
part of our efforts to protect a book's copyright, a set of pages in every
in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.")

So:  if books are collections of facts and the function of a search is to
find facts, this is almost useable some of the time.  If books are books,
it's a bizarre parody of what scholars and students might actually do.  I
will have to think long and hard about whether and how to introduce this
function to students.

But it's awfully useful for a new form of autogoogling -- looking yourself
up to see who quotes you.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown University

On Tue, 31 May 2005, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> I just noticed that the Google Print home page now has a search box, so
> you can search books directly.
>
> http://print.google.com/