Re: Something from the New Yorker about Google Book Search

[Jon Orwant <orwant@google.com>]

For the record, we use multiple subject schema -- no one scheme 
trumps another.  It's not correct to say that we prefer BISAC to 
LoC.  We sometimes try to guess a BISAC classification when none 
exists, and sometimes we guess wrong.

As for whether our attempts to improve the situation are utopian, 
all I can say is that I have a code change in flight that will 
improve the guessing. Whether that gets a meter or a mile closer 
to Utopia is not something my personal onboard navigational 
system is capable of displaying.

-Jon

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:32 PM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Grafton, Anthony. Google Books and the Judge. September 18, 2009.
>
> Some excerpts:
>
> "...bizarrely, Google sorts books, as Geoffrey Nunberg and 
> others have show n, not by the Library of Congress 
> Classification, but by the Book Industry Standards and 
> Communications used by publishers to tell booksellers where t o 
> stow a given item."
>
> And...
>
> "...it's utopian to believe that the company could or would 
> repair the millions of errors already built into the system -- 
> or that new problems won't continue to crop up, as Google 
> vacuums up more millions of books without finding out in 
> advance what book professionals know about how best to identify 
> and organize them."
>
> Full text at:
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/09/google-books-and-the-judge.html
>
> Bernie Sloan