Legal Research

Things to Know About Google Book Search

In my inbox for the past week Google Book Search has been coming up a lot. Here are three must know things that you might want to read:

Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Thanks LIS News)

``In its frenzy to digitize the holdings of its partner collections, in this case those of the Stanford University Libraries, Google Books has pursued a "good enough" scanning strategy. The books' pages were hurriedly reproduced: No apparent quality control was employed, either during or after scanning. The result is that 29 percent of the pages in Volume 1 and 38 percent of the pages in Volume 2 are either skewed, blurred, swooshed, folded back, misplaced, or just plain missing. A few images even contain the fingers of the human page-turner.``

Google Books updated with new features

``Google Books has seven new and useful features, including the ability to easily embed a book into a blog post, better search within books, easier access to tables of content, and a way to turn pages, as well as an improved Book Overview page.``

New Features on Google Books

Library Associations Release Guide to Google Book Search Amended Agreement (June 17, 2009)

``Washington DC?The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce the release of ?A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement.? The amendment represents important additions and this guide provides an overview to help librarians better understand the revised terms.``

At SLA last week we got to hear from one of the leaders in the Google Book Search group discuss the Google - AAP draft agreement. It will be better when all of the legal issues are settled in the right way so that we can move on with building better libraries. I`ll be interested to see what the courts decide.

I am excited to see so many SirsiDynix customers adding Google Book Search features to their OPAC`s using the Google and SirsiDynix API`s.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on June 23, 2009 (boomark / email).