0.2% full text? Yowch! Do academic libraries with full-text versions of the book on their shelves really want to point people to no-preview pages on Google. That's like a dating site with no photos of the members, and the profiles omit everything but their favorite potato variety.
Doing LCCNs and OCLC numbers for older books is a must. Tim On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Godmar Back <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ps: the distribution of the full text availability for the sample > considered was as follows: > > No preview: 797 (93.5%) > Partial preview: 53 (6.2%) > Full text: 2 (0.2%) > > - Godmar > > > > On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Godmar Back <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > to examine the usability of Google's book viewability API when lookup > > is done via ISBN, we did some experiments, the results of which I'd > > like to share. [1] > > > > For 1000 randomly drawn ISBN from 3,192,809 ISBN extracted from a > > snapshot of LoC's records [2], Google Books returned results for 852 > > ISBN. We then downloaded the page that was referred to in the > > "info_url" parameter of the response (which is the "About" page Google > > provides) for each result. > > > > To examine whether Google retrieved the correct book, we checked if > > the Info page contained the ISBN for which we'd searched. 815 out of > > 852 contained the same ISBN. 37 results referred to a different ISBN > > than the one searched for. We examined the 37 results manually: 33 > > referred to a different edition of the book whose ISBN was used to > > search, as judged by comparing author/title information with OCLC's > > xISBN service. (We compared the author/title returned by xISBN with > > the author/title listed on Google's book information page.) 4 records > > appeared to be misindexed. > > > > I found the results (85.2% recall and >99% precision, if you allow for > > the ISBN substitution; with a 3.1% margin of error) surprisingly high. > > > > - Godmar > > > > [1] http://top.cs.vt.edu/~gback/gbs-accuracy-study/ > > [2] http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net > > > -- Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
