Thursday March 22, 2007
Thursday March 22, 2007 Impact of Google Books on the academic profession
Take a minute to read this blog post from a landscape architecture researcher about how google books is changing academic history.
Some choice quotes in there such as "[in six months Google] Book Search has accomplished enough to transform the academic profession." Also: "Research in my world is very often a personal matter of haggling for more time with the particular librarian in question. They're used to us, and I figure they need a good struggle to keep them alert. But thanks to Google Book Search, these days of scavenger-hunt and tug-of-war are drawing to an end."
Whoa.
Interesting that I found this post through a search industry analyst blog and not through the usual library channels.
Also worth checking out is Content Statistics from O'Reilly books.
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It's an interesting post, but she's also a bit lucky to be in a field where Google Books is really a benefit. She's particularly interested in older titles that might be found in major libraries, which is precisely (and only) what's available there. She also never mentions the possibility that she's overlooking important works merely because Google hasn't happened to scan them yet. This means she's only really studying the collections of four or five libraries, right? (Not that they aren't excellent collections to be looking at.) She does bring up the point that her field is heavily reliant on sketchy memories and notes anyway, maybe by extension she feels like the omissions of Google Books are no different.
Posted by Josh W on March 23, 2007 at 09:30 AM EDT #
Josh, I also mentioned in my post that why GoogleBooks was so shocking was that they had books I hadn't seen after touring most of the major collections in the world that house specialty collections on my topic -- including but not limited to the Yale Map Library, Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks, the V&A in London, the British Museum, the Public Record Archive, and so on -- and also including whatever I could find on WorldCat and order through ILL via the extensive, generous, and totally well-managed folks at the University of California libraries. The fact that there were new titles *only* available to me via GoogleBooks was quite a shocker.
Historians try to rigorously excavate as many of the facts as possible, through much grant-writing, travel, and reading. Any other tools that help us to do our jobs more efficiently are definitely to be lauded.
Posted by jo on March 26, 2007 at 06:15 PM EDT #
And let's not forget the by now almost old hat but undeniably major feature of complete searchability. When you have a limited amount of time at a major research library and are looking for something very specific, it's easy to miss it in the print collection. With full-text searching you can find things you simply wouldn't have otherwise.
Posted by Amanda French on March 29, 2007 at 03:18 PM EDT #