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Google mashup: books and maps

According to AllPoints Blog, there will soon be connections between Google Books, Google Earth and Google Maps.

Google has posted locations found in some texts (Michael Jones’ demo at the New York State Geospatial Summit showed only publicly available ones) to Google Earth. When you click on a placemark you jump to the book’s page and to the exact page on which the location information was found. And you get a Google Map of all the places mentioned in the book.

Here are 2 examples. Scroll to the bottom of the book’s “about” page, and you’ll see a google map of every place mentioned!

This is definitely an indicator of where the net is going. As David Weinberger posits (and I’m seriously paraphrasing!), in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, the seemingly paradoxical idea of opening up or giving away your library’s metadata to the world is what will drive users to your library.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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