I have a hard time trying to figure out where to begin this blog, so I have decided to start at the beginning even though I have written a bit about this in a message posted to GOVDOC-L on August 8th. So here goes…
I was asked to find out how much government information is available in the various Googles. Over the past few months I had saved posts from GOVDOC-L that had Google in the subject line; so I thought this would be an easy assignment. Turns out that the messages did not give statistics, instead they were questions about Google’s practice of making the full text of all books published after 1923 unavailable.
Well I was a bit disappointed but I still thought that I would find the information on Google’s website. I figured that Google would be tooting its own horn about the growth of this infamous project. Not so. There are no statistics anywhere, and there was very little that described the scope of the project.
Next I went into research mode. I checked for articles in EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier and Lexis-Nexis. I found some interesting news articles on the project but again no statistics. I then tried to search the web pages of a few library partners I looked at the University I had a little luck on Stanford’s web site on Robotic Book Scanning. There was a page a few statistics listed there but alas they dated from June2004.
I even Googled such keywords that I hoped would bring up statistics. But considering how many different way one might refer to statistical information, it was frustrating to do. I didn’t find any statistics this way but I did find some intersting Blog entries about the full-text copyright issue.
So I was on my own.
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