Superpatron

Digitization of books is great, except for when you skip the maps and get the title wrong

One of my favorite books in my own library is the 1916 Biennial Report of the Director from the Michigan Geological and Biological Survey, in which there is an account of the resurvey of the Michigan - Ohio border.  There is a very careful account and survey of all of the properties that the border crosses, along with as much history of the original marks of the border as can be unearthed, and accounts of where the straight line border deviates from straight to match the actual land use at the time.  (A few people's barns changed states as a result, but not more than were absolutely needed.)

The link above goes to the Google Books copy which is scanned in from the Stanford collection.  It's great that I now have this ready at my fingertips whenever I want to look at it without going up to a high shelf to pull it down, except that a few pages (notably pages following p.37) are missing their maps, and that it was pure happenstance that I found it because the title page reads

By Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (Australia). Division of Chemical Physics, Geological Survey Division

well, no, that's not who published it. 

I reported both of those errors to Google Book Search through the feedback mechanism; it makes me wonder just what the systematic error rate is on geological and biological survey books, since there was an era when all of them had map or plate inserts that folded out and the typical "every page is the same size" style of scanning is going to get this wrong more often than not.

Espresso Book Machine - first look

I got to the UGLI in the afternoon, not the morning, so I didn't see the U of Michigan's Espresso Book Machine running.  But I did get to see it just sitting there, and they had a handful of printed copies from their inventory for review.  Here's some notes.

More info at http://lib.umich.edu/ebm .

The books

Some of the collection they had was early 20c books, original print dates 1915 or so.  The originals had black and white plates, and the reproductions printed those photographs poorly - lots of gray where there had been some kind of fine shading or white.  I didn't go back to the original scans or the original works to know at what point this loss of quality happened, but it was very noticable, to the point where there was clearly a loss of fidelity. 

I can imagine a PDF post-processing step that corrects for this, to make the images better; I'm sure that the printer itself can do a better job.

There are ISBNs on the backs of the books, but no front matter or back matter inserted to give a new copyright notice; the covers in this sample collection are from a couple of series, and the notes say "Over time, we'll build up a stock of cover template that users can choose from".

The printers

The equipment looks to the naked eye like a bunch of stuff bolted together (sorry, that's what it looks like to me).  There's a long main feed which looks like the assembly line that does the binding, with two printers bolted onto the side to feed stuff in.

The page printer is a Kyocera FS-9530DN, a 51 PPM black and white printer.  The printer driver from OpenPrinting says "one of the few printers from Kyocera that does not understand PCL or Postscript".   Stated resolution 600x600. 

The other printer (which I think does the covers) is a Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450 (review from PC Mag).  It will handle large format color printing up to 12.25 x 47.24 inches, though in practice the EBM maximum print size in this configuration is 8.5 x 11".

The comments

The other person looking at the machine with me wished there was some medieval lit in the collection, so that she could use a book instead of a laptop for reading.

The future of the library and the rat race for unarchived data

Kevin Kelly paints a picture of the future of the net - a network which is one big giant interconnected network that you can never escape from:

What is the future of the library in this world, asks Darlene Fichter? I can think of a few positive directions, and maybe a lot of weird ones.

Libraries with collections that are suitable for digitization will see part of themselves extended into the net in ways that can only grow. Pre-1922 collections become more valuable, because they can go online easily; archives that have a broad mission for accessibility rather than per-item profits will emerge out of their finders aids into the net.

The library as place continues to be relevant, either as an access point for people who don't own the means of connecting to the net, or as a print refuge for people who are overwhelmed by the net.

Kevin assumes that all of the data in the world will be online, echoing Mediamatic's Storage Mania issue of 1994:

According to some estimates, by the end of this century the total amount of computer memory in the world will be greater than the total amount of information in the world. The curves will intersect. At this point the demand for storage space will give way to a demand for information.
By that time historians will look back with a smile on our current worries about information overload. Once the data banks are up-to-date they will begin storing information directly at its source. Fresh info will instantly be slurped up by a hungry archive; first come, first served. All intelligent agents will be bought away from their bosses by desperate archivists, to join the rat race for unarchived data.

food for thought.

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!

how to structure a URL for every page of every book

My colleague Bill Tozier has been doing a bunch of digitization work for Distributed Proofreaders, and as a part of that we had some discussions of how you might create some infrastructure to let you build hyperlinks to individual scans of individual pages in particular books.

The observed problem is that if you have a book, and have scanned in a page of that book, there is no easy way to predict what the URL would be to link to that page. Every system (Amazon, Google Books, etc) has its own way of doing things, and none of them have any sort of predictable REST style URL structure for deep linking.

I can imagine a system which would have page names like

http://everybookeverypage.com/isbn/0123456789/page/6.html
http://everybookeverypage.com/issn/01234567/volume/6/number/3/page/12.xml
http://everybookeverypage.com/librarything/work/3097331/book/5320426/page/12.json
http://everybookeverypage.com/aadl/record/1243670/page/12.jpg

e.g. with a URL parser that referenced a naming system, and within that system had a regular structure for naming the elements, and the system itself allowed either for unique copies (like librarything) or possibly non-unique copies (ISBNs). The name would also encapsulate the format which the item would be returned in, either as an image or as a data structure which would have pointers to (something).

This system wouldn't need to have any data in it - it could just resolve or look things up (as best it could).

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 Scholar: Anurag Acharya interviewed by Barbara Quint at Information Today

Google Scholar in the news, an Anurag Acharya interview:

In its own quiet way, Google Scholar has become a major force in scholarly communication. For many researchers, faculty, and students, it is the first search tool used, challenging the popularity and utility of veteran databases licensed—often at considerable cost—by academic and corporate libraries. Yet announcements about changes in the constantly evolving service seem to occur rarely and with little ballyhoo. For example, did you know that Google Scholar has launched its own digitization project, separate from the high-profile Google Book Search mass digitization? Or what about the new Key Author feature? Or the expansion into non-English languages and non-U.S./Western European content? A conversation with Anurag Acharya, the designer and missionary behind Google Scholar, helped us catch up on the latest developments.

Anurag Acharya old home page at UCSB.

Anurag Acharya interview on Google Librarian Central:

TH: What is your vision for Google Scholar?
AA: I have a simple goal -- or, rather, a simple-to-state goal. I would like Google Scholar to be a place that you can go to find all scholarly literature -- across all areas, all languages, all the way back in time. Of course, this is easy to say and not quite as easy to achieve. I believe it is crucial for researchers everywhere to be able to find research done anywhere. As Vannevar Bush said in his prescient essay "As We May Think" (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945), "Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential."

Rik Belew did a review in 2005 about the quality of Google Scholar

Attempts to understand the consequence of any individual scientist's activity within the long-term trajectory of science is one of the most difficult questions within the philosophy of science. Because scientific publications play such as central role in the modern enterprise of science, bibliometric techniques which measure the ``impact'' of an individual publication as a function of the number of citations it receives from subsequent authors have provided some of the most useful empirical data on this question. Until recently, Thompson/ISI has provided the only source of large-scale ``inverted'' bibliographic data of the sort required for impact analysis. In the end of 2004, Google introduced a new service, GoogleScholar, making much of this same data available. Here we analyze 203 publications, collectively cited by more than 4000 other publications. We show surprisingly good agreement between data citation counts provided by the two services. Data quality across the systems is analyzed, and potentially useful complementarities between are considered. The additional robustness offered by multiple sources of such data promises to increase the utility of these measurements as open citation protocols and open access increase their impact on electronic scientific publication practices.

Espresso Book Machine demo at NYPL's SIBL

pulled straight from PR Web w/o comments:

New York, NY (PRWEB) June 21, 2007 -- The first Espresso Book Machine™ (“the EBM”) was installed and demonstrated today at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL). The patented automatic book making machine will revolutionize publishing by printing and delivering physical books within minutes. The EBM is a product of On Demand Books, LLC (“ODB” - www.ondemandbooks.com), the company founded by legendary publishing executive Jason Epstein and business partner Dane Neller, who joined SIBL’s Kristin McDonough for a private event there to speak about the EBM’s potential impact on the future of reading and publishing.

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday- Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library is located at 188 Madison Avenue (at 34th Street).

It makes you wonder a little bit about the cost per delivered book done this way compared to inter-library loan - I don't have all of those numbers in front of me to compare and I suspect it changes from library to library depending on how automated their ILL system is.

Technorati Tags: annarbor, sibl, nypl, superpatron

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 .

Planning for library services based on % of patrons with broadband

When I was at the WiLSWorld 2006 conference in Madison, Wisconsin last month, I had an interesting conversation with someone who was looking at planning for library services with a question as to what fraction of their patron base had access to broadband services. This recent Bandwidth Report from Web Site Optimization LLC and Andy King has (some of) those answers:

New Jersey edged out Hawaii for the highest broadband penetration
rate in the US. 48.6% of New Jersey residents enjoy broadband,
well above the national average of 35.1%. Workplace broadband
broke 90% for the first time in July, while video and VOIP traffic
surged.

There is a lot of regional variation, with the low end of the national scale running at about half of the national average, and I'd bet that if you broke it down on a county by county basis there'd be even a wider disparity. I'd recommend the full report for more details to help you plan your use of services that can make use of broadband (downloadable movies, books, etc).

Technorati Tags: bandwidth, broadband