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
>