Book People Archive

Re: New Yorker article on Google Books

You might want to ask that student to check the book collections at the
Internet Archive (www.archive.org). They've been scanning lots of books
and the material in their American Libraries collection mostly focuses
on Americana.

Also, be aware that the books in Google Book Search are often missing
pages and that the illustrations, if present at all, will be low resolution.
They are scanning faster than the Internet Archive/OCA folks, so they
have more material, but their overall quality is not as good. Missing
pages and illustrations don't really matter for search and discovery,
but they may matter to someone who is actually trying to use (or preserve)
the book.

JulietS
Distributed Proofreaders


>	I've got some fascinating anecdotal evidence that Google is
>seriously ramping up their books project. Our library owns a set of 4400
>sets of microfiched books from the 19th century, Library of American
>Civilization. They seem like a great thing until students look at them
>and find that they are in a weird format about the size of a credit
>card, and the visual quality is challenged at best. Each year we run a
>check of the U of Pennsylvania list to find which of these titles is
>available free online and add a link to our catalog when it is. In 6
>years of checking, we'd added 420 titles, or about 10 per cent of the
>collection. I happened to have a student check Google Books last month
>to see if they'd added anything new since August. They had - by the time
>we'd added everything, the size of our linked LAC file nearly tripled.
>Overnight, a quarter of the collection is linked. You can see the
>results at:
>
>http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1849.xml
>
>Terry