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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 [log in to unmask] http://www.library.lafayette.edu/