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
>  >
>



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