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I think Kyle brings up a great point. If we can get links to previews, patrons will have a better understanding of what a book has to decide if they want to go to another library on campus to look at it, request it to be retrieved from off-site storage, ILL it, etc. This would be a very useful thing to many patrons, I think. Edward On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]> 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. > > At first, this whole thing reminded me of a few years back when Amazon > wanted libraries to load their inventory into catalogs. The idea was > that letting people know an item that wasn't available in the library > could be bought from Amazon was a useful service. Not too many > libraries were takers. > > 0.2% might even be better and worse than it looks. Worse in the sense > that it could be some random public domain garbage that there's little > or no demand for. However, at the end of the day the percentage of > books available full text is far less important than if the ones that > are available are the ones that people want. > > On the other hand, if partial preview really is available for 6.2%, it > could be very useful for helping people decide if they need a book at > all. This has significant implications for ILL and circ costs over the > long haul. Presumably, the number of books with a preview available > will increase dramatically with time. > > kyle >