On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Michelle Watson
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>  Is there something in the code that prevents the link from being
>  offered unless it goes to at least a partial preview (which I take to
>  mean scanned pages), or have I just been lucky in my searching?  I
>  can't comment on whether or not the 'no preview'  is useful because
>  every book I see has some scanned content.
>

Yes, in Annette's example, the link is only offered if Google has
preview pages in addition to the book information. See the docs on
libx.org/gbs for further detail (look for gbs-if-partial )

I had the same subjective impression in that I was surprised by how
many books have previews - for instance, if I search for "genomics" on
addison.vt.edu:2082, 24 of the first 50 hits returned have partial
previews. Incidentally, 2 out of the 24 lead to the wrong book.
This is why I sampled the LoC's ISBN set.

It's likely that there's observer bias (such as trying "genomics"),
and it's also possible that Google is more likely to have previews for
books libraries tend to hold, such as popular or recent books. (I note
that most of the 24 hits for genomics that have previews are less than
4 years old.)
Conversely, for those recent years, precision may be lower, with more
books misindexed.

 - Godmar