Ah, but in our actual world we _don't_ have two choices, to send the
user to the physical book or to an electronic metadata surrogate. We
_don't_ get to force the user to look at the book. Most of our users
will start out in an electronic environment whether we like it or not
(most of us on THIS list like it)---and will decide,  based on what they
find there, on their own, without us making the decision for
them---whether to obtain (or attempt to obtain) a copy of the physical
book or not. Whether we like it or not. But again, most of us on THIS
list like it, and like the challenge of giving the user useful
information in the electronic surrogate environment to make up their own
mind about whether to obtain the physical book or not.

So we can disagree about whether Google metadata is a valuable aid to
the user in selection task or not, sure.

But if you think the options are between US deciding whether the user
should consult a physical book or not---then we're not even playing the
same game.

Jonathan

Tim Spalding wrote:
> 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.
>
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu