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The Google API returns sufficient information to NOT point people to books with no preview--it tells if full view, partial view, or no view is provided for a given book. I agree that our software that uses this API ought to either suppress no-preview books entirely, or present them in a particular way that makes it clear that they're no preview (if there's any point to this at all). Jonathan Tim Spalding wrote: > 0.2% full text? Yowch! > > Do academic libraries with full-text versions of the book on their > shelves really want to point people to no-preview pages on Google. > That's like a dating site with no photos of the members, and the > profiles omit everything but their favorite potato variety. > > Doing LCCNs and OCLC numbers for older books is a must. > > Tim > > On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> ps: the distribution of the full text availability for the sample >> considered was as follows: >> >> No preview: 797 (93.5%) >> Partial preview: 53 (6.2%) >> Full text: 2 (0.2%) >> >> - Godmar >> >> >> >> On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> > Hi, >> > >> > to examine the usability of Google's book viewability API when lookup >> > is done via ISBN, we did some experiments, the results of which I'd >> > like to share. [1] >> > >> > For 1000 randomly drawn ISBN from 3,192,809 ISBN extracted from a >> > snapshot of LoC's records [2], Google Books returned results for 852 >> > ISBN. We then downloaded the page that was referred to in the >> > "info_url" parameter of the response (which is the "About" page Google >> > provides) for each result. >> > >> > To examine whether Google retrieved the correct book, we checked if >> > the Info page contained the ISBN for which we'd searched. 815 out of >> > 852 contained the same ISBN. 37 results referred to a different ISBN >> > than the one searched for. We examined the 37 results manually: 33 >> > referred to a different edition of the book whose ISBN was used to >> > search, as judged by comparing author/title information with OCLC's >> > xISBN service. (We compared the author/title returned by xISBN with >> > the author/title listed on Google's book information page.) 4 records >> > appeared to be misindexed. >> > >> > I found the results (85.2% recall and >99% precision, if you allow for >> > the ISBN substitution; with a 3.1% margin of error) surprisingly high. >> > >> > - Godmar >> > >> > [1] http://top.cs.vt.edu/~gback/gbs-accuracy-study/ >> > [2] http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net >> > >> >> > > > > -- > Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding > > -- Jonathan Rochkind Digital Services Software Engineer The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu