At 06:52 PM 05/08/2008, Tim 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.


I don't think anyone's saying there aren't some pretty useless
entries in GBS, but these two examples strike me as illustrating only
one point:  if you go shopping for weak tea you can usually find
it.  The post-"here's the code" discussion was focused on the
usefulness (or not) of "scanless" GBS records to users of an academic
library catalog.  A fairly obscure book held by 9 OCLC-participating
academic libraries of the unofficial Carnegie class "we have the
money so let's buy almost everything" and a 28-page children's story
published in 1977 (held by 7 US academics and 11 Canadian academics)
are hardly representative of what might be found in most academic
library catalogs.  While they are perfectly valid illustrations of
bad GBS data, they are not valid illustrations of the worthlessness
of links to "scanless" GBS records in academic library catalogs.

Note that I'm not looking for valid illustrations (and I'm sure some
are out there), because a handful of incredibly intelligent real live
academic reference librarian educators down the hall from me have
already done extensive playing around with this and have determined
there's enough useful data in GBS to offer our users links even when
there's no preview or full text available.

Bob Duncan


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Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
Editor of IT Communications
Lafayette College
Easton, PA  18042
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