Book People Archive

Re: How to find the correct volume and issue number in Google

Thanks to Klaus for a helpful primer on finding volumes of periodicals
in Google Books.  It's fairly clear to me that Google's handling of
multi-part or multi-volume works is a mess, and indeed most other
digital projects have difficulties with them as well.  The main
problems are omission of volume information in the title-- I often
get a suggestion of a book with a URL to Google, only to find on close
examination that it's only one volume of the book, which isn't mentioned
anywqhere in the metadata-- and inconsistent titling that makes it
hard to collect all the volumes together.

(Google in particular also seems to have real problems with its fulltext
  book search.
  It's not uncommon that a search for a particular title of a 3-volume
  work will turn up one volume only, a search on the author of the book
  will turn up a different volume, and the third volume won't be findable
  at all.  This is puzzling, since both of the volumes I can find often
  display the same title and author, so they should be findable either way.
  Also, I'm guessing that all three volumes were shipped to Google in the
  same batch, making me wonder whether the third volume isn't hiding somewhere
  in the collection but unfindable either by author or title.)

I've been saying for a while that some of the most significant
underused resources from our public domain heritage is serial literature,
so I'm particularly interested in making sure that people can find
and systematically browse the periodicals of the past.  If anyone has
compiled systematically organized, browsable collections of issues and
volumes of various past serials from different sources, I'd be very
interested in pointing to these compilations, or adding the link compilation
to my own serial listings.

(One thing I can add: if a Google volume has been scanned from Michigan's
  collection, it's likely that Michigan's catalog itself may contain
  a reasonably complete set of links to the volumes.  They're not perfect--
  they still suffer, for instance, from some degree of inconsistently
  titles periodicals in some cases-- but they're often a useful place to
  look for serials from their collection: http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/

John