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Google Books As "Train Wreck" For Scholars
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 07, 2009 06:52 PM
from the mishmash-wrapped-in-a-muddle dept.
from the mishmash-wrapped-in-a-muddle dept.
Following up on our earlier discussion, here's more detail on Geoffrey Nunberg's argument that Google Books could prove detrimental to academics and other scholars. Recently Nunberg gave a talk at a conference claiming that the metadata in Google Books is riddled with errors and is classified in a scheme unfit for scholarly use. This blog post was fleshed out somewhat a few days later in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Quoting from the latter: "Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, [and] Stephen King's Christine... A search on 'internet' in books written before 1950 and turns up 527 hits. ... [Google blames some errors on the originating libraries.] ...the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves. ... In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore." The head of metadata for Google Books, Jon Orwant, has responded in detail to Numberg's complaints in a comment on the original blog post — and says his team has already fixed the errors that Nunberg so helpfully pointed out.
Related Stories
[+]
Technology: Opting Out of the Google Books Settlement, Pro & Con 125 comments
Here are diametrically opposing view on what authors should do about the upcoming deadline to opt out of the Google Books settlement. Miracle Jones writes "The William Morris Agency has come out strongly against the Google Books settlement for its clients, citing the fact that the settlement creates a non-competitive marketplace for a whole new product (orphan books), in addition to containing provisions that will make it impossible for writers to remove books from the database after 27 months have passed: 'We believe that the license being given to Google to publish and display with impunity out-of-print "orphan" works (where the rights owner is unknown and estimated by the Financial Times to be between 2.8 and 5 million books out of 32 million books protected by copyright in the United States) will open the door to establishing Google as the most comprehensive database, potentially a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power.'" On the other side of the debate, James Gleick writes "With the deadline approaching for 'opting out' of the Google Books settlement, the Authors Guild has posted an aggressive explanation of who it thinks should do that: no one. Not a single author in the world, it argues, stands to benefit from removing himself or herself from the class. This comes as part of a new set of 'Answers' meant to push back against what the authors group thinks is widespread confusion about the settlement; they also address questions about just what kind of money we might be talking about, and what kind of control authors will have over Google's use of their work."
[+]
Your Rights Online: The "Copyright Black Hole" Swallowing Our Culture 278 comments
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
[+]
Microsoft Blasts Google Book Deal 165 comments
eldavojohn writes "With authors, scholars, the DoJ and publishers ripping apart the Google book deal, it's Microsoft's turn. They're claiming it's frankly an illegal 'joint venture' and not a settlement. According to ZDNet, Microsoft's four complaints against the deal are: 1) Future infringements are covered by the settlement, affecting the exclusive rights of absent class members for the life of their copyrights. 2) The deal gives away to Google vast rights that were not contested in the underlying litigation. The lawsuits dealt with Google's displaying brief excerpts. Instead of compromising on that infringement, the parties instead agreed to give away the rights to display entire books. 3) The publishers who negotiated this deal each have undisclosed side deals with Google, which will likely give them better terms than the class will get. 4) The publishers plan to exclude their own works from the deal. You might recall over a year ago Microsoft's own scanning effort died."
[+]
Google Buys reCAPTCHA For Better Book Scanning 138 comments
TimmyC writes "This story may interest the Slashdot folk, many of whom use the reCAPTCHA anti-spam service. Well, reCAPTCHA is now owned by Google. Apparently, what attracted Google to ReCAPTCHA is that the company has linked its core authentication service with efforts to digitize print books and periodicals. The search giant has a massive (and controversial) effort underway in that area for its Google Books and Google News Archive services. Every time people solve a CAPTCHA from the company, they are also, as a byproduct, helping to turn scanned words into plain text that can be indexed and made searchable by search engines. Interesting times indeed."
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Who needs metadata any more (Score:4, Insightful)
Detrimental? (Score:2)
Re:Who needs metadata any more (Score:5, Interesting)
The odd thing about complaining about this is, what are they comparing to? A hypothetical perfect online database that doesn't exist anyways? The article says google got it wrong in some cases where, e.g. the Harvard Library got it right. OK, that's an issue for all of us deciding whether to search on our nearest computer, or at the Harvard library.
To me, google's project was a long time coming - somebody had to scan the world's back catalog. Maybe it would be better if governments had done it, but (and this is the point) they didn't. Google is.
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Re:Who needs metadata any more (Score:5, Insightful)
> The odd thing about complaining about this is, what are they comparing
> to? A hypothetical perfect online database that doesn't exist anyways?
That's exactly why this article is little more than some long winded trolling. So the metadata is wrong... As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine (which they seem to be), you can always check the metadata your self. I must think that as far as Google is concerned (and 99+% of its users) the metadata isn't nearly as important as the data itself. Once the data is collected you can always fix the rest.
Expect a new "tagging game" in the next year or two to manually correct these error.
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"as long as the books are fine.." but many are not (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine (which they seem to be),
Well, some are really good and well scanned, but others are a mess. From some organizations that do the scanning, you get missing pages and mangled pages. You get pages where the person doing the scanning sometimes put their hand between the page and the glass, so you can read the rings on their fingers but not the text on the page. (Books scanned at NY Public Library for example.) If ever there is a fold-out, you get at max half o
Re:Who needs metadata any more (Score:5, Insightful)
How about good old fashioned legwork? It *is* possible to make sure that the metadata is consistent with the facts, but that involves doing actual research and verification such as academics have been doing for hundreds of years.
Then you have very low standards indeed. There's absolutely no reason why a single entity had to / has to scan all the world's back catalog on their own as fast as they can. It's pure commercial greed, and leads to the garbage we have on the net today.
What is needed is an open standard for scanned works, with minimum resolution, minimum quality, and minimum verified metadata such as subject, author, publisher, year etc. All those are trivially listed on the title page of every book. All one has to do is open the damn book and flip a few pages, but that appears to be too hard for some people.
This is a long term project for humanity. There's absolutely no point in having crappy scans with garbage metadata available quickly today, when it could be available correctly with good quality in say five years. It's also a perfect case for crowdsourcing, with some real standards to ensure quality.
The current dreck that's online only causes duplication and waste. Take a look someday at archive.org (for example), and see how many copies of the same book are available, if it's a popular book. You'll typically find 5-10 scanned versions, by Google, Microsoft, and various local library projects, in black and white or colour none of which is truly good quality: broken characters, pages with dark margins, missing pages, typos or incorrect titles, wrong authors etc.
Why did they bother?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I worked for the Harvard Law School Library and saw such a work in progress for the documents used in the Nazi war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg. The process of putting this together was extrordinarily expensive and even with the HLSL donating the Server, Traffic, labor to maintain the back end code (which it still does), etc. the project ran out of funding 13,904 scans in and is currently seeking funding.
Although the metadata surrounding the scans of these books would not have to be nearly as detailed, it's
Re:Who needs metadata any more (Score:4, Interesting)
What is needed is an open standard for scanned works, with minimum resolution, minimum quality, and minimum verified metadata such as subject, author, publisher, year etc.
Necessity is the mother invention. Wait for one to pop up, or go make one up. Nobody's stopping you.
All those are trivially listed on the title page of every book. All one has to do is open the damn book and flip a few pages, but that appears to be too hard for some people.
Opening the covers of every possible resource you use is quite easy when you have a discrete, present set of resources to thumb through. What if your resources aren't present, are high in number, or (lo!) are undefined...because you don't even know what exactly it is you're looking for?
This is a long term project for humanity. There's absolutely no point in having crappy scans with garbage metadata available quickly today, when it could be available correctly with good quality in say five years.
I think you're absolutely wrong. It's naive to assume we can just have an instant rubber-meets-the-road system available in x years without rigorous testing and input on the part of users. No point? Hah! This is absolutely the best way to go about things! Let the system work itself out with angry users pushing technicians to improve archives to have the best working system in the end. The Google system is hardly "done" and it's only going to get better with time.
The current dreck that's online only causes duplication and waste. Take a look someday at archive.org (for example), and see how many copies of the same book are available, if it's a popular book.
God forbid we have multiple copies of popular books in different archives.
black and white or colour none of which is truly good quality: broken characters, pages with dark margins, missing pages, typos or incorrect titles, wrong authors etc.
Quality is relative. Why prohibit use because we lack perfection?
Why did they bother?
Why did you bother? Why did I bother? Why does anybody bother? Probably because we all feel like it.
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There is no reason (Score:3, Funny)
There is no reason for you to post this comment here when you could have put together a properly formed and documented essay in a couple of months. There is was no reason for Newton to come up with his theory of gravity when in a few centuries Einstein would come up with a more complete theory.
This is a long term project for humanity. We damn well better start now rather than waiting to do it right. Badly data can be cross compared and corrected. Data which has not been digitized at all is completely useles
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given a project of this magnitude, there are inevitably going to be bad scans, and bad data, and other issues.
And, just as inevitably, the problem areas are going to be updated and replaced with good ones when they become available.
"There's no point in having crappy scans with garbage metadata today" would be indisputably true if every book out there was a crappy scan with garbage metadata. Instead, what we have a starting point with some good scans and some bad ones, but there's no point holding back the
if you don't like it... (Score:3, Informative)
Why did they bother?
Why did you bother to comment on it? If you don't like it - don't use it.
You are clearly ignorant of the key problem with the Google books settlement (as it currently stands), which is that Google and only Google will be given the right to reproduce orphaned works. I assume the morons tagging this "caveat emptor" are also ignorant of this.
So your glib remark should more correctly read, "if you don't like it, never have access to millions of pages of orphaned copyright works again because Google has an exclusive licence to reproduce them electronically". Which doesn't quite wor
Re:Who needs metadata any more (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. And the whole argument totally ignores the fact that these books are now easily available.
Shock horror: I am a liberal arts scholar. And Google Books has helped me incredibly in a project I am doing on a 18th century scholar. I have original texts in various editions at my fingertips, wonderful reference books (including a dozen 18th and 19th century Latin grammars), and serious secondary literature. Not all of these are fully posted on Google Books, but now I know what books to check out of the library, or even buy.
As an arts scholar, I love Google books.
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Error free system? (Score:3, Informative)
So, the argument is that the new system is bad because it may have errors or bad data?
Were card catalogs immune to this? It's a database. It's only as good as what you put into it. A bad database is not useful. It just means someone needs to do it better. Honestly, if anything this seems like an argument that the database shouldn't be proprietary. It should be open to everyone so that someone can always make a better version of the metadata with the same base data.
"It's a piece of shit" shouldn't be the same argument as "nobody should even try it". The Wright brothers didn't exactly start out with a 747 or an F-35.
Card catalogs (Score:5, Interesting)
Tangential, but "card catalogs." Ha! I once had a compelling need to look up an article in the Occasional Papers of the Bingham Oceanographic Collection. So I went to the card catalog.
It wasn't under O. It wasn't under P. It wasn't under B. It wasn't under C.
It was under N.
Why? Because, naturally, as of course everybody knows, the Bingham Oceanographic Collection is part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)... ...is in New Haven.
The great thing here is that you can't even say there was an error in the card catalog, unless filing something under a heading that is perfectly correct, but under which nobody would dream of looking for it, is considered an error.
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Re:Card catalogs (Score:5, Informative)
Well, organizing books by listing them in which city they are from (printed) is among the oldest way of cataloging printed books. The practice goes back to Gutenberg and the so called "incunabula" period where book dealers/printers/publishers (often the same persons) would make book catalogs out a certain city. So if you needed a certain edition of a title, you would have to track it by such book catalogs, since the Leipzig edition would be different from the Mainz edition.
It is of course sad that once such common knowledge among scholars now seems forgotten, probably not a hindrance when working with modern sources, but still necessary to know when working with old stuff, just like knowing that words/names starting with J were filed under I etc.
Many academics still puts the printing city in their sources, though many seems to have forgotten why they do so.
You just happened to stumble into a book /journal catalog organized by a centuries old and previously very well known method. The error wasn't in the card catalog or the way it was organized, but in that no one ever told you about these ancient methods in your library course.
--
Regards
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Wrights didn't start out building toy birds, true. They first tried to use the data from some Russian or European who had modeled wings after birds. They found that the lift his data predicted was so far off from what they observed in their gliders that they could no longer assume that the data hadn't just been made up. Then they went and built a small scale wind tunnel and designed small model wings which could be reformed and shaped and angled easily and a scale which could be used to measure lift
all the books in the world (Score:2, Interesting)
We are trying to correctly amalgamate information about all the books in the world. (Which numbered precisely 168,178,719 when we counted them last Friday.)
- Jon Orwant (Google)
why does that number seem incredibly low to me?
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Re:all the books in the world (Score:5, Funny)
They haven't finished counting Stephen King's books yet.
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Re: (Score:3)
They forgot to count the Wheel of Time.
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"scholarly" information (Score:2, Interesting)
As someone who majored in English Literature in college, I can tell you that academics love getting their panties in a bunch over what is Scholarly Publication and what is not. Some teachers will actually have special assignments that have to be written entirely using Scholarly sources, or in response to a Scholarly article.
Before the advent of the internet, I can see how it might have been useful to have an in-group comprised of people who had some sort of qualifications to write about something, but it s
Re:"scholarly" information (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry if I sound bitter, but I spent a lot of time reading this crap, and very little of it was as insightful or interesting as even my classmates' comments.
That sounds like more of a you problem than an academia problem. If you don't enjoy using a work's minutiae to accuse perfectly innocent authors of misogyny, innuendo, (to add a couple you forgot) blatant colonialism or latent homosexuality, what the fuck were you doing in an English Lit program? The rest of us live for that shit.
As someone who should not have majored in English Literature in college
There. I fixed it for you.
Parent
Re:"scholarly" information (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the GP's got a good point. Back in college, I took a number of humanities courses whenever I could squeeze them into my schedule.
I can say from firsthand experience that there are a lot of "scholarly" articles that are complete and total crap. When writing papers, I'd frequently peruse JStor [jstor.org] for pertinent articles about my topic, keeping an eye out for particularly good articles, as well as the heinously bad ones. Picking apart and systematically disproving a bad paper published in a "good" journal was an easy ticket to an 'A' on the paper.
These papers, of course, were certainly the exception. Most scholarly papers I encounter are humbling in their brilliance. However, I've seen more than a few bad journal articles, as well as quite a few blog entries that would be worthy of scholarly publication. It's hard to make any generalizations about the validity of certain sources of information.
Unfortunately, Physics wasn't quite as easy to bullshit (Random aside: The physical sciences certainly have their fair share of bad journal articles, especially in light of the fact that printed media is a terrible means by which to communicate scientific results. It's a cruel irony that the www was invented to enable collaboration and information exchange between scientists, but is rarely (if ever) used for that purpose. Also, any use of the word 'trivial,' or its synonyms needs to be punishable by death.)
PS. Don't judge our writing abilities based upon out slashdot comments. I'm sure the GP had his own reasons for majoring in English, even though literary discourse is often trite and contrived.
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Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has scanned many volumes of the Laws of Indiana, which go back to 1816. These are the session laws of the Indiana General Assembly and have never been copyrighted. However, Google has arbitrarily decided not to make most post-1922 volumes it has digitized, and even some pre-1922 volumes (e.g. 1877, 1893, 1895, 1909, 1917 and 1918), available, using the claim of copyright.
Google has done all the decision-making here. Anyone who might object to the classification of one of these volumes as copyrighted and thus available in "snippet-view only" presumably would have the burden of proving the contrary. (And where would you even start? Who would you contact? I have seen nothing on this.)
Once (or if) the settlement is approved early this fall, Google's "rights" attach to these volumes. If I understand correctly, at that point any individual who wishes to access one of these volumes of Indiana's session laws not already in "full view" will have to pay for it, and for the money will obtain only individual rights, NOT the right to make it freely available to others.
Broader implications: Finally, this analysis has been limited to volumes of Indiana session laws, but surely similar situations exist more broadly.
For more on this, see this Aug. 2, 2009 Indiana Law Blog entry: http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2009/08/courts_my_probl.html
Re: (Score:2)
Something is usually better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is no exception. Before google books you had access to books from various libraries, books you owned, books you could loan from friends (*shock* *gasp* copyright infringement), books you could buy and books from non-google online sources. Now you have access to all of those and additionally google books. Even if google books is 99% "piece of shit" (which in my experience is simply not true, but nevertheless) you still have the 1% potentially useful material available that wasn't available before, so you win.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the existence of google books makes it harder for others working on similar systems (and there are others, this isn't just a pipedream) to become established. A Google Books court-approved class-action copyright settlement would make it harder for somebody else to reach a similar agreement (because the public interest argument will be harder to make). Essentially, this is a field where the first person to do it is likely to end up with a monopoly, and Google have done it badly, thus pr
Sure, libraries make mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)
like shelving 'Life of an Iceberg' under biographies, but by and large they strive to be and are correct. If they mess up, some other library will fix the error. Libraries' cataloging data is usually centralized by OCLC so that the data is uniform throughput the country as other libraries pull from this central source for their own catalogs. Libraries also use a recognized and standardized subject scheme with a controlled vocabulary, not just a bunch of meta tags. Cataloging librarians are a rare and little-recognized breed of people who spend their entire professional lives trying to make it easier to gain access to material. The result is an organized body of knowledge--not just a heap of books on the floor in no particular order, like the Internet--and Google. For Google to blame libraries for their troubles is like blaming the Machinist Mates on the Titanic for crashing the ship into an iceberg. There, full circle. How did that happen?
Why Isn't Google Books A Library? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So you haven't read any of the stories that have appeared on Slashdot in regards to Google's plans for their Books service eh?
Re:Why Isn't Google Books A Library? (Score:4, Funny)
With all the class act talent that Google hires right out of college, why can't Google create its own Public Library on the Internet? Chrome could be the entry way to any book that is in the Public Domain, or by the Authors written permission. Turning the page of a book could be as simple as the [Back], or [Next] button. The "Card Catalog" would be a No-Brainer. No Library goes through these many hops. There's even translation to other languages, Brail, and Audio; from my viewpoint, this SHOULD be the challenge, not what word category is or isn't. If it's a case of "buy the book", then to buy 10 copies of "Gone with the Wind", and ONLY allow up to 10 readers to ONLY read "Gone with the Wind". Google could even have a "Google Online Library Card"; this is were the company hums "Ka-Ching".
I think that's the idea, perhaps you should go check it out: http://books.google.com [google.com]
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Obnoxious (Score:3, Insightful)
The inline replies are written with a smug sense of self-entitlement as though he and other "scholars" are the only legitimate users of Google Books. It's NOT about you - you are not going to create enough adsense hits to make this whole thing worthwhile (or turn a profit).
Re:Obnoxious (Score:5, Insightful)
Definatly. It's like, "Oh, look, I found an error. If I had done this, that error wouldn't be there!!" And to that I respond, then do it yourself. YOU go tack metadata onto the 100 million books they have, you smug egocentric bastard.
And, of course, he completely ignores the 999,999 proper entries compared to the 1 error. Google seems to know there's lots of problems here, and they're not going to get it right the first pass. But having a first pass at all is better than nothing.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like saying that Slashdot is obnoxious because it is "written with a smug sense of self-entitlement as though he and other 'geeks' are the only legitimate users of the Internet". This is true; but that is because it is a geek website
The argument that should have been made here... (Score:3, Interesting)
... is that academics can't rely on Google Books to make their bibliographies, because the publication date and authorship information, which are used in all citation styles (MLA, Harvard, etc.) are incorrect on Google Books for an apparently large amount of books. Categories aren't used in citations, they're used by searchers.
Jon Orwant of Google said that 1899 was a placeholder year for unknown publication dates, as provided by some of their metadata providers... which leads me to ask if they sanitise their data or do any research into publication dates themselves!
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
WorldCat.org
Find it on Google Books, look it up on there; Google Scholar if it is an article. I am a historian, and when I check citations (for journals or my own work), that is how I get it done.
Google's brilliant vagueness (Score:5, Insightful)
This is much like Google itself.
Google's brilliance, and woe, is its sloppy imprecision.
You type in a query. It returns a bunch of stuff. Quite a lot of it is irrelevant and as perceived as not meeting the requirements of the search, but you don't mind because all you care about is that it finds what you want, not that it finds other stuff. Unfortunately, Google is so good that it tricks you into believing that it always finds everything that matches your query. But, of course, there's no way to find out what it _missed_.
I've personally noticed and been puzzled by the publication dates. I'd noticed it particularly with periodicals. What seems to be the case here is that Google is very prone to give the date that a journal began publication as the publication date of every article that has ever appeared in that journal.
Wikipedia editors are well aware of the dangers of using Google hit counts as data. It's amusing to see that there are 1,930,000 hits on "Ghandi" compared to 22,900,000 for "Gandhi" and conclude that Gandhi's name is misspelled 10% of the time... or to notice, as I have, that that percentage is increasing and project the year in which "Ghandi" must inevitably become the accepted spelling... but it is, as they say, "for amusement purposes only."
Too much information? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, having all of the world's literature available for instant full text search sounds
disastrous for scholars.
Book publishers endangered, cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Google destroy the books after scanning? (Score:2)
The impression I get from these stories is that once Google scans them, no one else can. Is that somehow the case?
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The impression I get from these stories is that once Google scans them, no one else can. Is that somehow the case?
Yes, once Google scans them they gather up all the copies and burn them. Just kidding, any one is free to scan them and put them online too. Microsoft used to scan books [wikipedia.org], and the Internet Archive has it's own scanning project [wikipedia.org] that is still ongoing (but they might be restricting themselves to out of copyright works, I don't know).
Cue the "OMG Google book monopoly" slashbots (Score:2)
Also to get back to the topic at hand, it looks like they are trying to fix this as best they can and librar
Quit Your Whining! (Score:2)
Scholars have lawns too you know (Score:3, Interesting)
This could be the stupidest and most disingenuous argument I've encountered all year. I guess I'll never know since the metadata is not at my finger tips. This might be a good argument for getting the metadata right. It isn't a good argument for tossing the virtual books out with the bathwater.
So no I won't get off your lawn. We're better off without scholars who'd rather hoard information. Begone!
Another Day of Microsoft Trolling? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to be so cynical, but there was a huge uptick in negative articles on Slashdot about Google as soon as Microsoft started their anti-Google PR effort in DC. Now I see at least one anti-Google article on Slashdot every day. Is Slashdot falling for an extensive trolling effort from MS?
More info available from previous Slashdot article... [slashdot.org]
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Yes. This is a followup including a link now to the Google blog addressing the metadata issues with the original links there for reference.
Did you not read the last line of the summary?
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Re:Incredible arrogance of the "scholar" (Score:4, Interesting)
You're fighting the wrong battle here. It's easy to find any number of legitimately nasty things about 'Scholars' and 'Academics' and elitism in general. But arguing for proper classification in Google Books is not one of them.
For several years I was an avid amateur of Information Retrieval. Classification (and other useful organisational models) of information into related collections is essential when you don't know what keywords you're looking for. This is especially important with historical works, where the use of 21st Century names, terms and other common keywords is next to useless.
Google search is useful when you know what you're searching for. But knowing what to look for in Google Books is an entirely different matter. Categorisation matters here.
By using a classification system that is designed for book sellers, Google's chosen a very poor set of criteria. Not only will most of the titles be poorly characterised (and thus harder to find), the effort required to find them increases with their rarity or uniqueness. These aren't always a measure of importance or interest, but often enough, they are.
Asking Google to consider a proven, effective and well-understood categorisation system is not being snooty; it's an effort to suggest - as we geeks often do - that there might actually be a correct way to perform this task.
Sometimes what looks like 'arrogance' is actually the state of being right [imagicity.com] about something when no one else will listen.
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