Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Google Book Search bibliography from Charles Bailey

via read20-l:

Charles Bailey's Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 is now
available from Digital Scholarship.

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm

This bibliography presents selected English-language
articles and other works that are useful in understanding
Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of
Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues
associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to
works that are freely available on the Internet, including
e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional
repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may
not be identical.

--

scanners ahoy!

new Google Book Search API in the works?

I got a query from someone inside Google who is working on a "new Google Book Search API" and looking for people interested in it. I'm trying to find out more.

I suspect it's different from this Google Book Search part of the Google AJAX Search API, but that's a guess; it might indeed be the same. If that's the case, here's some resources from resourceful people:

Dojo: Meet Google Book Search tells the story of integrating Google Book Search with the SFU Bookswap using the Dojo toolkit. Dustin Thomson put this together - he writes:

Google offers a Search container, which allows the integration of several search sources, including the web, images, blogs, news items and books. I only wanted the Book source so I chose to take the simple route and not use the container class. Instead I used the GbookSearch object directly, which allows me to access the data more easily as well as utilize only the desired functionality.

Among other things, he documents how to get book covers from Google via their API (and a bit of URL rewriting). Useful stuff, too much for me to parse to put together a sample for myself right now but it doesn't look like the resulting code is more than a page of text.

Technorati Tags: google, dojo, google-book-search, gbooksearch, sfu

Book finding systems on your Blackberry web browser

I'm collecting instances of online book finding systems that either work well by design or by accident on Blackberry web browsers. I do this for a couple of reasons:

- I have a Blackberry
- There's some idealistic views of what a mobile book finding device should be
- Most of those idealistic views are wrong
- Some of the actual uses are interesting (and easy)
- Two people clicked on a Feedburner ad for Blackberry in my RSS feed

Here's something like a run-down.

Purpose built systems from libraries

There are some library book finding systems specially designed for small screens. I don't have a huge list of them (yet). This is an announcement from Black Hills State University:

http://iis.bhsu.edu/lis/pda/

Patrons on the move can now stay connected with the BHSU Library. The E. Y. Berry Library-Learning Center at BHSU recently launched a new website for PDAs and other handheld devices such as Blackberry, to cater to the needs of the growing number of mobile users. Users can now search the library catalog, check their library account, and see library hours while they are on the move.

As far as I can tell this runs on a South Dakota wide network on top of the Aleph system. A second one from Ball State

http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/mobile/

Through our mobile Web site users can search the library catalog and serials collections; and see library hours, contacts, and information on our various collections and services while on the go. The site was designed for ease of use and navigation for mobile devices with their constaints on bandwidth, screen size and memory.

Non-library book finding systems that have mobile interfaces

My poster child for this would be LibraryThing Mobile

http://www.librarything.com/m/

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/06/announcing-librarything-mobile.php

The idea is simple—you get the most important features of LibraryThing through your cell phone's "internet" feature. So you can check whether you have something—by title, author, tag or ISBN—when you're in the bookshop, browse your catalog, and read your reviews. You can even accesss your "Pssst!" recommendations. But I don't know anything about cellphone security, so you can't add items, and you can't look at private libraries—even your own.

Like the other systems mentioned to date, this is a read only interface - it helps me figure out what I own, or perhaps what I aspire to own if I've tagged it right, but it doesn't handle the need of scribbling down the name of a title that you want to remember for later or to look up something and add it to your list of books to read.

Mobile non-library non-book finding systems of general use

Here we escape the bounds of the library world and even the book world and look at systems which solve a more general problem of mobile personal recall and mobile search without necessarily being tethered to a particular book oriented problem.

Google

Google Mobile has to be mentioned here - if you've stashed away a book list in your Gmail, you can search for it from your Blackberry's Gmail interface, and find it whether or not you had explicitly dumped it into a book finding system. This is the most general kind of search, and depends entirely on your personal ability to squirrel away useful information.

There's no mobile version of Google Book Search that I know about, and no mobile Google Scholar, more's the pity. The Google search engine is OK on a mobile phone but suffers from providing primarily pointers to non-mobile content, so you lose a lot.

Yahoo

Yahoo's delicious service fills the bill here too, if you have already decided to use it to bookmark books. It's pretty easy to construct a browser bookmark that would be something like
http://del.icio.us/vielmetti/toread
and then refer to that next time you were wandering through a bookstore or library looking for ideas. More elaborate URLs and more elaborate tagging supports more precise memory systems.

Twitter

This last one probably should be first, because it's so awesome. Twitter has three mobile interfaces - an SMS based one if you have a cheap SMS plan, a Jabber based IM interface to go with Google Mobile Talk, and a mobile browser interface that I use because it has $0 additional fees and is acceptably fast.

Step one: collect a few hundred people in your Twitter friends list; make sure to include some librarians.

Step two: Post the question
I'm at the library. What should I read next?

Step three: Get personalized suggestions from people, or a reference interview if you aren't careful. Iterate until you find exactly what you want.

Step one in this is the obvious critical step - if you want good book finding, you need to build the set of people who will give you good recommendations.

Technorati Tags: mobile, search, book-finding-systems, blackberry

Ben Bunnell on Google Book Search

from their Google@School series:

Technorati Tags: google, googlebooks, search, ben-bunnell, goog

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita

Google Book Search data metadata quality check

Google Book Search list of books printed between 0-100 A.D. At this writing, 2315 works.

I only noticed this because there was a search I did with a date range trying to get very early books that turned up a bunch of books from the year 0019.

Metadata is hard.

I've reported this to Google - the response I got back from Ben was "We're working to make the metadata better across the board."

Technorati Tags: metadata

Google Book Search adds personal library

From Google Operating System:

Google Book Search has an incredibly useful new feature that lets you build a virtual library of your favorite books. You can import the books if you have a list of ISBNs or search them and click on "Add to library".

Your library has a public URL you can share with other people (here's mine) and even a feed. You can also write reviews, rate the books or categorize them using tags. Probably the most important reason you should build the library is because it becomes searchable. Imagine being able to find a scene from one of your books without knowing its title and by typing some keywords that describe the scene. Of course, Google didn't index all the books in the world, so many of your favorite books aren't yet searchable.

The biggest list of ISBNs I have is in LibraryThing. I love LibraryThing - tags! more tags! etc. - but sometimes I just want to key in some search terms and get back some likely results. I didn't see a direct ISBN exporter from LibraryThing, but I got the same results from this setting, using a custom field setting for "E" and then cut and paste into the Google import box (carefully, avoiding stray crap):

Google Librarian Central weblog launches

Google has a new Google Librarian Central blog going, written by their librarian outreach team. They're aiming it at

the vast majority of you heard about the Librarian Newsletter and Librarian Central website through listservs or blogs run by fellow librarians and other colleagues. (We hope you'll also tell your colleagues and friends about the new Librarian Central blog). You also told us where you work: mainly in university and school libraries, followed closely by public and special libraries.

of course, a few patrons will be listening in....

Technorati Tags: google, superpatron, library, librarian

Google Librarian newsletter for 12/2006

The Google Librarian newsletter for December 2006 is out. Highlights include directions on how to create your own custom search engine that searches only the sites you are interested and interviews with the people behind Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

Jeff Ubois on digital archives and mass digitization on the Scoble Show

This video podcast of an interview by Robert Scoble of Jeff Ubois (mov) has a good discussion of the issues surrounding digital archives.

This is a different kind of show for the ScobleShow, one where we talk about an issue that we should think about — in this case whether companies who are scanning books and other information from the world's libraries and universities are doing us a favor. Jeff Ubois is a co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists' Television Interest Group and is an expert about issues in digital file preservation and archiving.

Read more of Jeff's close following of these issues on his blog archival.tv .