At 12:04 AM 05/07/2008, Godmar wrote:
>. . .
>I had the same subjective impression in that I was surprised by how
>many books have previews ...
While trying to figure out why I was seeing a link to a preview in
Virginia Tech's catalog when I was seeing a link to just basic info
in our test catalog (for the same book), I stumbled on an interesting
twist to the situation. It appears that the information returned by
the Book Viewability API can vary based on the query. Consider these
7 static URLs for "Inside the Economist's Mind: conversations with
eminent economists". (Note that using the standard number values
below with Book Viewability API code achieved the same results in
GBS; the static URLs are just for ease of illustration.)
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC69593982>
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=LCCN2006017115>
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1405159170>
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9781405159173>
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1405157151>
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9781405157155>
<http://books.google.com/books?q=intitle:inside+the+economist's+mind+conversations+with+eminent+economists>
Only the last three URLs bring up the book with a preview
available. The first four bring up the book, but without a preview
available. The non-preview results show a 2006 pub date, while the
preview available results show a 2007 pub date, and I get the whole
pre-actual-publication brief vendor record problem (I think), but
what's disconcerting about this is that in WorldCat, the OCLC number
and LCCN above belong to the book with the 2007 pub date, which makes
one wonder how/where GBS is getting its info. And since the title
search brings up just one record, why haven't the records without the
preview been ditched in favor of the one with the preview?
Is this just a case of you get what you pay for, or do they have
database integrity issues? (Note that I haven't explored this
extensively so it's conceivable I just happened to stumble upon the
only book in GBS that exhibits this phenomenon.)
Bob Duncan
~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
Editor of IT Communications
Lafayette College
Easton, PA 18042
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http://www.library.lafayette.edu/
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