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