The Google API returns sufficient information to NOT point people to
books with no preview--it tells if full view, partial view, or no view
is provided for a given book. I agree that our software that uses this
API ought to either suppress no-preview books entirely, or present them
in a particular way that makes it clear that they're no preview (if
there's any point to this at all).
Jonathan
Tim Spalding wrote:
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
>
--
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--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
