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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. Continue reading
Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop
The Education Dept's ERIC Clearinghouse gave notice of this recent report on educational potential in Second Life: ERIC #: ED493670 Title: Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop, Part of the Second Life Community Convention (1st, San Francisco, California, August 18-20, 2006) As a volume of proceedings, this is a compilation of papers. My favorite paper based solely on title from these proceedings is "Down the Rabbit Hole ... or How the NMC Took the Red Pill and Got a Second Life (Larry Johnson)." From a government information perspective though, people might be more interested in "Designing an Educational Island inside Second Life for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) (Eric J. Hackathorn)" Both papers can be accessed at the link above. It also appears that at least some of the content in the ERIC database is visible to Google, since I received this link in a Google Alert. It would be interesting for someone to research whether ALL of the ERIC content is accessible through Google since we've reported on significant amounts of government information are hidden from Google. Continue reading
Google and state documents
According to Library Journal, Google announced last week that it had formed "partnerships" with four states, Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia, to offer index and search capabilities for public information in state government databases. Google's Public Sector program seeks to make government information, much of it in the dark web of databases, more accessible through their SiteMaps protocol. A Sitemap is "an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently" (Wikipedia). I'm all for making govt information at all levels more findable to search engines, and SiteMap is an interesting way for Web masters to do that -- sort of a MARC record for crawlers. Another way to do that is for libraries to write/blog about their collections, their documents, the questions they answer and the resources they use to answer those questions. Libraries can also use web services like del.icio.us to collect and describe the Web sites that they use on a daily basis (see our tag cloud for an example). (On a side note, has anyone seen 50 matches, a search engine that only crawls web sites that were bookmarked or voted for by people, in sites like del.icio.us, digg and reddit?) These will in effect release the information that libraries traditionally hold in closed systems and databases, make our collections (both digital AND physical!) more findable and vet the Web for our users. Got other ideas for "info-catharsis"? Let us know in the comments. Continue reading
Criticisms of Google Book Search
Recently, there have been a couple of criticisms of Google Book Search that go beyond the knee-jerk arguments we hear from time to time.
In a post on the ACRL blog (Siva Vaidhyanathan Questions Google Book Search, by Marc Meola, ACRLog, April 23rd, 2007), Meola describes a presentation by Siva Vaidhyanathan at the Drexel University Libraries' Scholarly Communication Symposium. Siva asks some pointed questions of Google and its library partners. I was particularly struck by this thought:
At one point, Vaidhyanathan compared Google Book Search to the Human Genome Project. Here, he claimed, a for-profit company named Celera demonstrated it could do the work better and faster, but governments declined, recognizing that this information should not be privatized. Now Vaidhyanathan became animated, stating that it should be the same for knowledge and asking, "since when is expediency one of the core values of librarianship?"
In a post at the AHA blog (Google Books: What's Not to Like?. by Robert Townsend, American Historical Association Blog, April 30, 2007), Townsend notes the problems he found with Google Book search included poor scan quality, faulty metadata, and "truncated public domain."
Over the past three months I spent a fair amount of time on the site as part of a research project on the early history of the profession, and from a researcher's point of view I have to say the results were deeply disconcerting.
For specifics about Google Book Search and government documents, see: Need Full Access to Gov Docs in Google Book Search.
Continue readingNeed Full Access to Gov Docs in Google Book Search
An Open Letter to Google, William Patry, and Google's Library Partners
All I'm asking for is full access for the public to government documents on Google BookSearch. These documents are in the public domain and therefore should not be limited by claims of copyright, by Google or by the Library Partners.Also see: Google Book Search treats government documents as copyrighted material
It looks as if Google is definitely considering all post-1923 works under copyright.Continue reading
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