Computers in Libraries 07, Wednesday

Greg Notess, publisher SearchEngineShowdown.com, “Book Search Engines Update” (A305)

See his book search page (http://searchengineshowdown.com/booksearch) and his presentation (http://searchengineshowdown.com/booksearch/cil07)

Full text searching of books is for:

• Different information source
• Searching, not reading (usually)
• Verify citations and find mentions, such as first mentions of a term
• Consider other potential uses

Scanned/converted books:

• OCR quality varies
• Full content scans
• Electronic files conversions – may lose initial letter or special characters (such as apostrophes)
• Huge collections of data
• Multiple editions of a work because different library scan the same item

Book Search Engines:

• Amazon’s “search inside the book”
• Google Book search
• Open Content Alliance
• Internet Archive Text archive
• Live Search books
• Individual publishers’ initiatives
• Open Web

Amazon and A9.com

• When in Amazon, go to the books store to search
• A9, use the books box to search only books
• Search inside is different from look inside
• Currently published books
• Including reprints

Google books is “to help you discover books, not read them…”

• Books.google.com
• Scans of books or electronic copies from publishers
• The have agreements with publishers, and if no agreement, they are not included unless it is in Google Library.
• Google Library scans books from libraries
• Google considered items in copyright since 1923, even if it is not.
• They have three levels of viewing:
• Limited access
• Snippet view
• Limited view
• Full view
• No preview available
• One problem is older fonts were not made to be scanned or read online.
• Google provides links to: the publisher, stores and shopping sites, and OpenWorldCat and 14 other union catalogs.

Open content alliance:

• Internet archive, Yahoo, O’Reilly, Microsoft, and others.
• Some is in live.com books. Do a search, click “more” under tool/tab bar, then select “books” and it will search just books
• In Internet Archive, go to the “texts” section.

Flip books format is used by Open Library openlibrary.org

If you want newer, copyrighted works, start with Amazon, then try Google.

In the open web, see Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg.org) and online books (digital.library.upenn.edu/books) and many other hidden spots. To find the hidden spots, search the title as a phrase search, and maybe phrase search from content. You can look for lists of books my searching for title with no space and by searching for the authors’ last name.

See his presentation to create google and yahoo searches to find ftp sites of books.

Publishers sites may have enough info to get you what you need, may show where it is full text, or actually provide some electronically.