Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
1/1/2008
By Dian Schaffhauser
Yes, Google is opening up whole new worlds for internet surfers and researchers everywhere-even before the model is ready.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE about Google’s book digitization project. Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved-you’ll find that Book Search (from the fifth most valuable company in America) is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude. It doesn’t even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities.

Here’s the magic: Type “sonoma” and “mission” into books.google.com and choose “Full view” to eliminate those books that haven’t granted permission to be fully displayed or that are still in copyright because they were published post-1923. About 550 titles show up, almost all of which you can view in text format or as a PDF file. Perhaps the oldest reference that will appear is a volume titled An Overland Journey Round the World During the Years 1841 and 1842 by Sir George Simpson, governor-in-chief of The Hudson’s Bay Company’s territories. Google digitized the 1847 volume from the collection of the New York Public Library, as the bar code on the cover shows (along with a small portion of what looks to be a human arm, probably belonging to the person scanning that particular title).

(Read more of Dian Schaffhauser’s article at the link at top of this post.)