For the most part, I completely agree.  That said, it's a very tangled
web out there, and on occasion those "no preview" views can still lead a
user to a "full view" that's offered elsewhere.  Here's just one
example:

http://books.google.com/books?id=kdiYGQAACAAJ
(from there, a user can click on the first link to be taken to another
metadata page that has access to a "full view")

Unfortunately, there's no indication that either of these links will get
you to a full-text digitized copy of the book in question (the links
always, of course, appear under the header of "References from web
pages", which Google has nicely added), and there's also no way to know
that a "no preview" book has any such "references from web pages" until
you access the item, but it's something, at least, however unintended.

It'd be nice, perhaps, if you could put some sort of standard in the
metadata header of the webpage (DC or otherwise) to indicate to a
harvester (in this case, a crawler) the specific format of the
retrieval.  Then these links could be labeled as "digitized copies
available elsewhere", rather than simply "references from web pages"
(which, of course, is all that they are right now), and could also be
added to the API callback.  That is, of course, if Google doesn't
eventually put up these and other localized resources as well (and I'm
sure they'll cover most of these, with the collections that they do
have)...  but until or if they do, it would go a longer way to
fulfilling their mission.

Mark Custer



-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Tim Spalding
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 6:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] coverage of google book viewability API

So, I took a long slow look at ten of the examples from Godmar's file.
Nothing I saw disabused me of my opinion: "No preview" pages on Google
Book Search are very weak tea.

Are they worthless? Not always. But they usually are. And,
unfortunately, you generally need to read the various references pages
carefully before you know you were wasting your time.

Some examples:

Risks in Chemical Units
(http://books.google.com/books?id=7ctpAAAACAAJ) has one glancing,
un-annotated reference in the footnotes of another, apparently
different book.

How Trouble Made the Monkey Eat Pepper
(http://books.google.com/books?id=wLnGAAAACAAJ) sports three
references from other books, two in snippet view and one with no view.
Two are bare-bones bibliographic mentions in an index of Canadian
children's books and an index of Canadian chidren's illustrators. The
third is another bare-bones mention in a book in Sinhalese.

>  If the patron is sitting on  a computer (which, given this
discussion, they obviously are), the
>  path of least resistance dictates that a journal article will be used
before a book.

An excellent example. Let's imagine you were doing reference-desk work
and a student were to come up to you with a question about a topic.
You have two sources you can send them to-the book itself in all its
glory, and another source. The other source is the Croatian-language
MySpace page of someone whose boyfriend read a chapter of the book
once, five years ago. You're not sure if the blog mentions the book,
but it might.

That something provides the path of least resistance isn't an argument
for something. It depends on where the path goes.